Multi-zone / musiccast advice

[daleBT]

Hi,
I'm after some advice on a multi-room speaker set up for our new rental house.

I currently have an Yamaha A-3060 A/V receiver which is set up in our home theatre / lounge room. That room has a 7.1 set up.

The house also has 6 other rooms with in-ceiling speakers installed, with 2 speakers per room, and all cables piped back to the lounge room.

I currently have the receiver and speakers set up with 3 zones, being the main / lounge room zone with 7.1, and two separate rooms as the other two zones. But I'm maxed out in terms of outputs the receiver can handle and am several rooms / speakers short.

I'd like to get Musiccast working across these rooms so the wife can work the system, but I'm not dedicated to that app. I was thinking of another A/V receiver or amplifier to power the other rooms / speakers but not sure how best to implement this while keeping it simple and not blowing out the budget (ie as cheap as possible). I'm currently unplugging and plugging in speakers to switch between the patio and main bed, which I'd like to stop doing!

Can anyone offer advice?

The A-3060 can take one more zone if I get another non-yamaha/musiccast amp to plug in but that doesn't seem as flexible as getting another musiccast capable reciever or amp. As mentioned though, not wedded to the musiccast approach.

For clarity, the speaker / room set up is as follows:

Lounge room - 7.1 speakers - Zone 1
Outside patio - 4 speakers, in different areas, but both zone 2
Formal dining / lounge - 2 speakers - zone 3

kitchen - 2 speakers
rumpus room - 2 speakers (open plan with kitchen so could / should be same zone as kitchen)
home office - 2 speakers
main bedroom - 2 speakers.

Thanks!!

 

[AmericanAudio]

I would stick with Yamaha / MusicCast service. The app has improved well over time and I would argue that they (and others) are at least on par with Sonos and even passed it with quality and capabilities.

The issue with bringing another system into the mix is switching between the two depending on where you are / what the room is connected to.

You 'could' add a 3rd party streamer to the Yamaha, but then you won't get good sync between it and the other rooms as there will be two layers of processing via streamer and Yamaha and only one in the directly connected rooms. So if you grouped them together you get a weird echo effect.

One of the reasons I argued against Sonos as a system if a customer wanted an AVR to listen to music or in anything other than a dedicated cinema room.

HTH

Chris, AAC

 

[Joe Fernand]

It is all down to what you want to listen to in the additional Zones - if they can be a 'slave‘ off the AVR Zone 2 and 3 you can add additional Speaker Switch (impedance matched)+Speakers, Amp+Speakers or Active speakers to those zones.

If you require independent music streams in the additional Zones you can add one or two WXA-50 powered Zone Players.

Joe

 

[daleBT]

I would stick with Yamaha / MusicCast service. The app has improved well over time and I would argue that they (and others) are at least on par with Sonos and even passed it with quality and capabilities.

The issue with bringing another system into the mix is switching between the two depending on where you are / what the room is connected to.

You 'could' add a 3rd party streamer to the Yamaha, but then you won't get good sync between it and the other rooms as there will be two layers of processing via streamer and Yamaha and only one in the directly connected rooms. So if you grouped them together you get a weird echo effect.

One of the reasons I argued against Sonos as a system if a customer wanted an AVR to listen to music or in anything other than a dedicated cinema room.

HTH

Chris, AAC

Thanks. Would you recommend another Yamaha amp then? Something with another 7 channels, or something else (like a couple of WXA50s?), or just a speaker switch? I'm happy to have only 3 different streams max concurrently - eg a movie, and two different music streams, although this would be a rare use case, normally all the same or 2 different music streams.

 

[AmericanAudio]

Personally, I would run WXA-50's for each zone in the house / garden.

It will give you full independence in both source and volume and would be far easier for anyone else to understand and use in the house.

You could bundle a few areas together if needed, but you then start to lose independent volume between the two areas unless you added simple volume controls that can turn a sub-zone off or down.

If it were me, I would maybe bundle the Kitchen and Rumpus together and Master Bed on a pair of WXA's and save a bit by using their little portable Yamaha player for the office / study.

 

[WestBayNewport]

First, new to using forums and not sure precisely where to post this question so apologies for likely getting this wrong.

We recently had a new Yamaha system installed with a switch allowing for a 2nd zone on our patio. Using MusicCast is so easy and straight forward, however I cant seem to figure out if this is possible. Playing different music via iphone/airplay in different zones from the same device. For instance Sirius streaming inside the house and apple music playing on patio from same device. Or can this only be done using multiple airplay enabled devices?

Again, thank you for your patience. First time posting.

 

[Joe Fernand]

You either ‘share/group’ a Source/stream across multiple Zones or use multiple Source devices to play different music in each Zone.

Where you have three or more Zones you can group two or more zones plus play something different in any of the other Zones.

If you have streaming services configured on your MusicCast account you can use a single device (iPhone, iPad etc) to control each zone independently.

Joe