Hello all.

I will be starting my first "real" whole house audio system soon. On Friday I'm heading over to make a road map of all of the wiring. This fellow approached me a few years ago to do the pre-wire but my son was in the hospital for a few months, etc etc so I couldn't do it. I knew I would get the job in the future for the equipment so I did a plan for the fellow and the guy renovating his house pulled the wiring.

Without listing all of the exact wire to every room, partly because I don't know for sure, I expect to find wiring for a 5.1 channel in-wall surround system in the main family room, with all of the wires and a conduit pulled to a central rack closet located in an adjacent room. There should also be either a pair of 16-2 or a 16-4 and cat5 to a wall in each room, and then 16-2 to the speakers in that room. There should also be cat5 and wire run to 3 separate outdoor areas.



I have experience with smaller systems, like a couple of zones of Sonos or a multi-channel amp running from an Airport express or Sonos. I have some ideas but I'm very interested to hear what you would do. I know he would iPhone/iPad control and has iTunes of course. I would like to feed the sound from the multi-room audio system into the surround system in the family room but not necessarily the other direction.

I personally am partial to outboard amplifiers vs. a system that has the amps built in.

I have access to Sonos, Russound, Niles, and Casatunes so I would really like to use one (or a combination) of the three.

It is just this guy and his wife in the house and he likes to entertain.

He never made any mention of video distribution.

Hopefully I've given enough information to generate some good chat. If you want more info I'll do my best but will know more of the capabilities on Friday. I just wanted to have a couple of ideas to toss out there when i do my first site visit on Friday.

What would you do?

Thanks very much, Craig