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

Craig,

I had some similar questions that were answered in a thread I started called "Whole house audio thoughts..." I would take a look at that thread as there were several suggestions. I looked through all of the suggestions and I really liked what I saw out of the Russound C-Series controllers coupled with the Russound DMS 3.1 Digital Media Streamer. If you need more power, you can add external amps on the variable outs of the Russound C-series controller. All of which can be controlled by the My Russound app in case the wire runs didn't have an allowance for wall controls. Hope this helps.

lots of flexibility on the c series product. Heartily agree.

Good to know. I'll read that thread before I post anymore inquires.

Thanks guys.

Craig

When you say outboard amplifiers, as long as your design allows full chassis size amps, you're going in the right direction. I don't spend a lot of time trying to remember things that I thought were bad ideas, but several years ago the rage was to run CAT5 to a wall pad location, have a power amp there powered off the CAT5, and run speaker wire from that location to the speakers. Folks who installed those have since gone nuts and are kicking themselves for not also running home runs on those speaker wires.

If you put all the amps in a central location and home run all the speaker wires, you can change out the power, the zoning, everything. The more you put parts outboard from the rack, the more you lock yourself into a design that could be a bad idea in five years.

Do you know what sources they want to listen to for house audio? I am finding Sonos fitting a lot of the jobs I'm doing now, even if it's just a source on a bigger DA system. But I'm doing a ton of Sonos as the main audio source/matrix and using external amplification. Then you can do all the house audio with sonos, and only the surround zones have to be turned on with the room remote.

How many zones total?

A lot of options, what control system are you using? I've been happy with Rti and their app controlling Rti ad4/&, russound, zektor, and would like to try nuvo. 2 way feedback worked well.

You can typically run one zone as a fixed output into the surround receiver.

You need to figure out total sources, total zones, how much power you need and take it from there.

I agree. I'm going to put a pin in this until I can get more details on Friday.

OK so here's what we have. Unless other wise mentioned all of these cables come to a central rack closet.

Outside

16-4 to a fire pit area
16-4 to a near by gazebo
2 x 16-2 to a hot tub in the same vicinity as the fire pit and gazebo.
2 x 16-2 to a small courtyard kind of sitting area on an adjacent side of the house, completely separate from the other three

Inside

Living Room

5 x 16-2 to ceiling
HDMI and 3 x Cat5e to TV

Kitchen

2 x 16-2 to ceiling
3 x Cat5e to TV wall location

Master Bedroom

The following cables originate in a Wall plate in the corner of the Master bedroom:
HDMI and 3 cat5e to TV wall location
Speaker wire to ceiling

From the wall plate to the rack:

3 cat5e

My Plan

My plan is to use Casatunes CT8. It has 6 hardwired stereo outputs (6 zones) to go to amplifiers, and up to 10 wireless Airplay zones where it can Airplay to compatible systems.

I plan to use a 12 channel amplifier for the outside speakers. The Gazebo, hot tub, and courtyard will get 40x2 for a single speaker, or a pair of speakers. The run out to the fire pit will likely get four bridged channels for up to 80watts /ch and I might use a Sonance Sonarray in that area as it is quite large and would be well served by multiple speakers. This leaves two channels of that amp unused for a future run to the front yard, or maybe to bridge channels and get extra power to the hot tub speakers if the aren't loud enough. The maximum run of any of the the outdoor 16-2 or 16-4 is about 100ft and that would be to the fire pit and Gazebo. The others are less than 50ft. The casa tunes system will feed the outdoor speakers as four separate zones so I can tweak each area of speakers for the perfect volume relative to the seating area near the speakers, and them group them as well (excluding the courtyard which is it's own separate area) under one master volume control for that area.

The Master Bedroom TV will be connected to a Cable Box and Apple TV, and the audio will be fed to a small 50x2 Class D amp for the two speakers in that room. All of the these items will be hidden in the wall behind a 46" TV. The amp has a second priority auto switching input and it will be fed by Casatunes as it's own zone so the user can have music and then when it's TV time, the input is forced to the TV sound automatically. I'll need to fish speaker wire from behind the TV to the wall plate, which is no problem.

The Kitchen will have a TV and I will fish an HDMI (this house has one floor with awesome attic access) about 40ft back to the rack to connect to a cable box there. I will also use an audio ballun to feed audio from the TV back to an amp in the rack to power the kitchen speakers. It will be the same 2 channel auto switching amp as the Master Bedroom so that Castunes can feed audio into the kitchen as well.

Finally the Living Room will be it's own independent system which will have an Airplay capable AVR so that Casatunes can turn on the receiver and feed audio into that room when it's not in use for it's own purpose.

Casatunes will be controlled by an iOS app. The Master Bedroom and Living room with a Pro24r/Prolinkr, and the Kitchen TV with the universal that comes with the cable box since it's just the TV and cable box in use there.

Who ever put in the home network already put an access point at the back of the house and signal at the Fire Pit and Gazeebo is plenty strong for control of the sound outside.

What do you think?

Craig

Is the Casatunes something you can integrate into the Pro-control system? It would be great if you could make this house function under one system.

Maybe like and RTI/ Nuvo solution or the like.

loose the 12ch amp for the outdoor areas and get a single crown CDi in there. Also forget about the sonarray, sounds like total A$$ you can get much better performace from rock speakers or my favorite sonance mariners on a aluminum fence post driven down in the ground. this way you can tap each speaker for proper volume and you can simply daisy chain.

also loose the 16ga wire if you choose to go 8ohm for the outdoor system. minimum of 14ga especially for the sonarray.

You didn't mention control of the TVs. 1 controller for TV and audio is best, in each indoor zone. Do they always have an iOS device handy?

Are.you set on Casatunes? Russound might be a better option.

A reputable Russound distributor may be able to tell you exactly what to use, for everything.

There is a tremendous added value in a good distributor.

Each indoor room with TVs and dedicated audio systems will have their own remotes dedicated to those areas. The Casatunes system will play into those areas and is controlled by an iOS app.

Cassatunes cannot be controlled by Pro-control.

My only Russound dealer sucks. I don't trust them. I did go over the system and when combined with the digital music server it looks pretty good, but Casatunes is capable of more, plus the closet that this is all going in is not deep enough to accommodate the size of the Russound electronics.

Good call 3Pedal. What I want to be able to do though, is have a different source in the Courtyard, and while I want the same sources at the hot tub and Gazebo/Firepit, I want to be able to turn off the Gazebo/Firepit when just the hot tub is in use. With just one 2ch amp for the outdoors I couldn't do that. I guess I could use another small 50/2 amp for the courtyard and then another for the hot tub, because their wire runs are shorter. Use 70 volt for the Gazeebo and The fire pit. That would be a massive amp for just a few speakers though. Does Crown make anything decent that's smaller? I don't need 500 w/ch for 6 speakers (if I lose Sonarray and go rocks, this is not a big area).

The multichannel amp seems like the right fit to me as far as functionality goes and Casatunes has the ability to fine tune the volume in each area and turn unused areas off. It has up 8 hard wired zones and 10 wireless zones. Plus, the cost of the 12 channel amp is much less than a CDi and a couple of extra two channel amps, not to mention simplicity and space saving in the rack (which is an issue - I'm trying to keep this all under 42" of rack height. More is available with some construction if need be.).

With the 12 channel amp being a better fit as far as functionality and also saving money, would a solution the wire issue be to simply run 12awg wire out to the Firepit and Gazebo. The backyard is under construction and there is a conduit to the back. I've put audio systems in houses pre-run with 16-2 and had lengths over 100ft. Things sounded fine.

If Sonarray sucks I won't bother. Rocks or posts will be just fine.

Thanks very much.

Craig

Craig,
Do you have a loose budget or are things locked down? I know this. Is your first go at a full blown deal and I think now is the time to do what we do. Integrate.

Now is not the time to have 3 or 4 pro control processors laying around. Do thing that is designed for centralized control.

We are here to help. If you let us this will be an amazing system.

I say RTI with a zektor audio controller, your amp of choice, small HDMI switch, media server (Nuvo or autonomic).