Wiring and connection suggestions

paulheinsohn

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I just purchased a new home that I am currently renovating and want to wire it for whole home audio. I have 3 different TV locations (Man Cave, Living Room, and Bedroom) that are planned. I would like to set up a 5:1 speaker arrangement in the Man Cave and Living Room and a simple 2 channel speaker arrangement in the bedroom. In addition to this I have 7 other zones where I will be installing speakers. Three of these zones are outdoors where I am contemplating using sonance landscape speakers/amplifiers while another zone will use just 2 pairs of outdoor speakers. The remaining 3 indoor zones will have pairs of ceiling speakers. I have a very extensive media library that is contained on NAS drives that will provide much of the content for this system through Plex in combination with different streaming services.

Questions:
1. Should I plan to use the TV's as my primary source selector and run ethernet into them for their source (they all have Roku built in) and then feed HDMI ARC over high speed CAT back to an AV receiver (like a Denon AVR-X8500H) or should I plan to plug streamers into the AV receiver and output the video from the receiver through the HDMI out to the TV's? Which is the easiest to wire and set up? What about switching, I want to output the audio so different people could watch different TV shows in different rooms and yet still hear the audio for their show through the speakers in that room, how difficult is that?

2.From a source selection standpoint would I be better of using one big AV Receiver like the Denon or 3 smaller and less expensive AV Receivers and then wiring that into something like the HTD Lync to be able to control the individual zones? Which would be easier to wire, set up and more important, use?

Thank you for any advice.
 
Its a big job and you've landed on an UK/European site. I would suggest asking the same question on something like AVS forums to get a more US centric focus.

Initial thoughts, If all your sources are data based then run all your visuals as individual systems and plug sources into the AVR's then on to Tv's. ARC and eARC are not reliable enough or designed to run long distances in my opinion.
 
Its a big job and you've landed on an UK/European site. I would suggest asking the same question on something like AVS forums to get a more US centric focus.

Initial thoughts, If all your sources are data based then run all your visuals as individual systems and plug sources into the AVR's then on to Tv's. ARC and eARC are not reliable enough or designed to run long distances in my opinion.
Thank you for your response. I have two follow up questions.

1. which do you think is more unreliable/difficult, distributing video from a centralized av receiver or trying to feed the audio back to it via ARC/eARC?

2. would you use 1 13:1 3 out receiver to handle the 3 zones or 3 more modest receivers to handle each zone individually.

Thank you for any insight offered.
 
ARC and eARC is without a doubt more problematical

3 modest AVR, 1 per zone will be far easier to program and control.
 

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