Need Advice on Whole House Audio for 16 Speaker Pairs
Anonymous
Posted on
I am currently building a house and plan to prewire the speaker and volume connections for 16 speaker pairs.
I need some guidance on which systems can best fit my need to drive at least 6 sources into 6 zones ( I plan to have multiple speakers per zone).
I plan to have one of the sources be from my home automation computer and hence the need to override source selections to broadcast audio from the computer to all zones on demand.
Since you are building the house, it is best to have a professional audio and electrical installer put CAT-5 or CAT-9 (or even better) wires throughout the house, along with ethernet and whatever other electrical wiring that you may want or would be beneficial to future protect your house (at least as best as one can with current knowledge and no crystal ball). It is far less expensive to wire everything before the walls are up than to retrofit after the fact. Take care to have enough wiring in all rooms for all possible in-wall, in ceiling, and even speaker outlet plates for possible installation of tower or bookshelf speakers. This gives you a ton of flexibility, along with a great sales tool for any person who may buy your house in the future. Beyond audio/video, there are auto hook-ups for lighting both inside and outside the house, along with multi-zone thermostat capabilites, whole house air filtration, etc.
You need to discuss this with an audio/video installation pro, an HVAC pro, and household electronics professionals to remove as much as possible any buyers remorse.
With gigaibyte ethernet outlets in most (if not every) room, you will get the best computer/internet performance (beats any wi-fi)and have the possibilty of having one or more computers control everything from indoor/outdoor lighting to numerous other things barely thought of yet, such as spying on babysitters:-)
As is true of all purchases, budgets determine what you can do. But many professionals can still steer you and far less expensive directions to get most of what you want.