Evening Gentlemen,
To give you some background on where I'm coming from I submit the following. After growing up doing electrical, framing, plumbing etc at my father's side, I worked for Time-Warner Cable as an in-house Installer and Service Tech for 5 yrs. I then realized doing belly crawls through blown in fiberglass insulation in the heat of a Florida summer, and gaffing poles in the rain, keeping an eye out for lightening strikes, wasn't what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. Computers where a hobby of mine since my 1st AppleIIc+ clone made by Franklin. So with some fortuitous timing, I literally hung up my steel toed Redwings and Klein tool belt on a Friday and went to work Monday wearing a shirt and tie as a computer geek. That was 8 years ago. For the last 4.5 years I have been a computer network administrator where I help support, with assistance from a team of people, a home office, with over 400 servers and thousands of workstations, and branch offices located all over the U.S. This includes the building/wiring/maintaining and trouble-shooting all facets of the network and servers.
So now that you know my "non-pro" skill set, in the future I plan to put an addition on the house and remodel the existing structure. So, I'm thinking this would be a great time to start looking at a centralized communications/entertainment configuration. Since my budget doesn't afford the hiring of true pros, such as yourselves, I feel this is something I can do myself. I humbly ask the real pros their opinion on the best distribution panel/system brands for home use. This will be for Data/phone/video/sound for a 3 bedroom house. I've been doing some research both on foot and via Internet, but most "home" system's information available do not include the specs I need to make a really informed choice. Info not readily available are things like "DB loss per leg on that brand's 6 way coax splitter", quality of shielding etc. Since most of the consumer forums here at Remote Central are not quite knowledgeable enough for the kind of info I look for, I've spent a lot of time in your forum where the kind of information you guys banter around is invaluable to me. I wouldn't bother you guys if I could think of any place else to get the real scoop, not salesman drivel. I'm looking for opinions/recommendations of brands based on reliability, quality, upgrade-ability, ease of installation, price to performance etc. I've looked at brands like Leviton etc. I can't afford some of the more exotic brands I've seen you guys talk about. I just want to put in a solid foundation that can be expanded as needed without having to redo the whole thing later. I thank you all in advance for any input you may offer.