Routing and controlling audio throughout house

[OhPinchy]

Not sure where to put this post so sorry if its not the best forum for it.

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to route and control audio throughout my house that I am currently renovating. I have just plastered the walls and ceilings but before doing so I ran speaker cables from the hi-fi location in the living room to the ceiling of every other room in the house. The intention is to have speakers recessed into the ceiling in the kitchen and the bedrooms.

I would like to be able to listen to music from the living room hi-fi in the kitchen and bedrooms: this would require the ability to specify which speakers the audio should be routed to (don’t want speakers in all rooms playing at once) and also the ability to remotely control the living room hi-fi from each of the other rooms.

Any advice on how to best do this would be much appreciated.

I live in Ireland and am travelling to the US for a week next week and found this website I could use which seems to have relevant gear at decent prices: http://www.jr.com

In particular the Niles stuff looks relevant: http://www.jr.com/JRSectionView.proc...4&BrandStore=t

The NILES AUDIO MSU480 Multi-room IR Wireless Repeater System Hub looks like it would be useful for allowing multiple remote controls in the other rooms but what are the “one infrared sensor for each of your secondary listening rooms” it mentions – would the NILES AUDIO MF1VF Infrared MicroFlasher be the right thing (as in have the hub attached to the hi-fi and then have a flasher in each secondary room?).

The NILES AUDIO SS-6 Six-Pair Speaker Selector looks like it could be used for indicating which room the audio should be routed to (e.g. only speakers in bedroom A should receive the audio at this time) – is this correct? I don’t see how I could control this device remotely though – is there anyway I could pick up a remote in the kitchen and tell this device to route audio to the kitchen? The alternative would mean I would have to walk into living room to press the button to route it to the kitchen, but from then on I could control the tracks, stations, volume in the kitchen using the hi-fi remote with the above remote repaters – not ideal but ok.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated as I’m fairly new to this and am a bit overwhelmed by all the options. Also – do the prices on this site look good enough to merit the hassle of lugging them home or good I get similar deals in the UK?

[hamd01]

It not exactly what I have done, but in my research I have probably come accross what you need;

You will need a speaker switch box to select which room you want the music to play in....this will sit between your amp and speakers, so I guess your lounge is this place for this. Have a look at Maplin's or CPC as they have some fancy ones.

With regards controlling the system from any room, the only way you can do this is buy getting a remote control sender / repeater. A receiver sits in each room and bounces the signal back your your amp. Have a look at home automation web sites for these.

Hope this help.

David

[brettgriffin]

Typically when you wire a home like this you will want to run the speaker cables thru a switch box for local control or run cat5 to a switch box and speaker cable to the speaker.

You might consider a network based audio system that could work wirelessly. I am not sure of what manufacturers to recommend but maybe some food for thought to search the internet.