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new home wiring questions

Hello everyone!

We are having a 5 bedroom home built (basement + 2 floors, rectangular

28' X 48') and I have certain audio/computer plans and had some questions. You guys seem to be very knowledgeable about so many things. My wife has some very definite requirements and constraints (that may seem odd) - I aim to please her :) Hey it's Valentine's Day!

As far as computer networking - I think I have it understood okay except for a few points. I got a great deal (someone I have dealt with needed to reduce his inventory quickly...long sory) on some shielded cat6 cable (1000 ft spool). I believe it to be pretty high quality cable. I plan on wiring about 12 wall jacks in various places throughout the house. For Video I plan on streaming video over cat6 to/from media pcs. We only have (and ever plan to have!) 2 tvs so this seems pretty manageable. One server in our media/computer rack and a pc next to each of the tvs we will stream to. The server will have 2 (maybe 3) capture cards. I haven't decided to go media center 2005 or mythTV yet (leaning towards wmc2005). Are there any special cat6 (vice cat5) concerns? I have run a fair amount of cat5 before but never cat6. I haven't unwound the cable yet but I expect it to be a lot more stiff than the cable I am used to since this is solid shielded 23awg cat6 cable. Should I run this cable before or after insulation is put in the walls? Any suggestions on securing the cable? Anyone use some safe staple-like brackets that you like? Things to avoid? I plan on trying to stay at least 6 inches away from the power line wherever I can. Is this enough? If I need them to go through the same whole in a floor joist somewhere how bad is that? Anyone know of good cat6 modular jacks? Should I definitely look for gold plated - I hear that the jacks need to be pretty high quality or you lose much of the advantage for cat6.

okay for the requirement whole house audio. My wife only wants 1 zone. I have asked her a lot on this and she doesn't want more zones. I am planning on having 8 sets of 2 speakers for the house and will be putting them in mostly sometime down the road. I don't have a decent amplifier at all right now so this will be for the future. (Any amplifier suggestions for driving 8 sets of speakers would be appreciated). I mostly just want the infrastructure in place. My wife's point about 1 zone is that if anyone for example in their own room wants something different then they can play it on their personal sound system. I am thinking of a spool of 250' of 14/4 speaker wire to run to the various impdedance volume controls for each of the pairs of speakers and 14/2 speaker wire to the actual speakers (from the volume controls). How does this sound? I believe almost all of the speakers will be either wall or ceiling speakers - I still need to price and look at these. Any suggestions? What wattage rating speakers should I be considering for such a system? I know it depends on cost a lot. I hope to spend