My new house has cable and phone in every room, but there are two different phone lines and I will have potentially 4 different A/V sources I want to centralize, then distribute on-demand to any room that desires them.

The sources are:

- DSS, two receivers.
- Local Cable TV (but only if I can get it free!)
- Rooftop amplified antenna (hilltop house, gets local CBS,NBC,ABC,PBS,FOX over air! ;-))
- A/V media from device rack. (DVD,SVHS,VHS,Hi-8,CD,game)

There will be at least five TVs, and 7 sets of speakers. The TVs will be:
- Home theater room
- Kitchen
- Master bedroom
- workshop
- guest bedroom/office

Speakers will also be in the dining room and outdoors on the deck. There may also be a cable jack on the deck for hooking up a TV there.

I want to home run cable and speaker wire from all rooms to an electronics room in the basement. The media rack will be in the home theater room, but its output will also run back to this electronics room.

I want all sources brought into this room and combined onto seperate CABLE channels, so that they can be "tuned to" at each TV.

I also want to bring the two phone lines into this room, and be able to direct them to any or all phone jacks throughout the house.

Recommend appropriate equipment to accomplish this, please. If you've done this, please tell me how well it all works.

Thanks in advance.

Dave

Look at the following brands:

AMP ( ONQ ) = phone /data / cable
Channel Plus = cable amps and goodies
Audio Access / Kustom / Elan / Xantech = house house audio systems.
SpeakerCraft for speakers

Hope some of it helps.
EMC
Etronixs.com

Some of it helps. Thanks, EMC.

Dave

To accomplish this will take quite a few modulators, one for each source desired to be viewed anywhere but the home theater. Also you will need an infrared repeater system to be able to control the desired equipment from outside the equipment room. For the speakers you will need an impedence matching device and volume controls for each set of speakers. If you have a phone jack in each room of the house you will not need to do anything for two lines besides letting the phone company know you want another line. In all it will take quite a bit of money to accomplish all you are asking to do, and there are many ways to do it. If you want exact help let me know, I do it for a living and will be happy to assist.

Tim

As of yet, only my wife and I reside in the house. I plan on getting two universal remotes with RF base. The base will stay in the equipment room, and the remote will follow me to whatever room I'm viewing in. The other remote will follow my wife, and work with the same RF base.

I was fortunate to discover that all cable jacks from each room were routed thru an accessible attic. Since my DSS and roof antenna will come from the attic, I may put my switching room up there. It will be easy to take the mess of cableTV cables and convert them to "home runs" from each room. What I need now is a good modulator/signal amplifier to combine the DSS and roof signal and send them down to each room.

The Phone lines are a bit trickier, since they come into the house from the side and disappear into a finished basement ceiling. I've seen somewhere a device that lets you route phone thru the power lines. If I could simply "plug" a working line2 into a power outlet, then receive it at any other power outlet in the house, that would be a simple solution and save having to reroute phone lines. I've also heard the only two of the four phone wires are used, and that a second line can be wired to the unused pair effectively getting both phone lines to every phone jack. Then simply splitting out the jack to a second new jack would give me line2 where I want it.

Does anyone have experience with either of these two phone line strategies? Good or bad points?

Thanks,

Dave

on the phone subject:

i have never tried the phone over ac line before so i couldnt tell you. i can tell you that there are 2 wires used per phone line pr1 should use red and green and pr2 use yellow and black. your idea will work just make sure that all the jacks in the house have the yellow and black hooked up. most of the time they are not because they are not normaly used. also check the telco box where lines come into the house to make sure they are connected.

Thanks, Brian.

A peek into the telco box revealed a nitemare tangle of phone cables, none labeled. I painstakenly sorted then out, unwound the unused yellow and black wires from each line, and then unhooked every line. Using a pair of two-way family radios, I had my wife go to the phone in each room. I'd connect one set of wires at a time, and ask her (over the radio) to see if the phone in that room got a dial tone. When I located each room, I labelled the cable from that phone. We did this for every phone jack in the house.

Now knowing which set of wires went to which room, it was a simple process to hook the yellow and black wired from the rooms I wanted a second line in to the second line terminals in the telco box.

I had an old radio shack two-line controller (cat. no. 43-381)that made using those two lines in one jack very easy. It's got three buttons; Line1, Line2, and AUTO. It plugs into the phone jack, and has two jacks of it's own; "pass Thru" and "select". I plugged the computer modem into "pass Thru", as I want it always to be on line1. The phone and answering machine plug into "select" and can be switched using the line1 or line2 buttons to use either line. When the AUTO button is pressed, the phone will ring no matter which line the incoming call is on. This way the answering machine can answer calls on both lines. Great product!

Dave

I found the same nightmare of TV cables in the attic. Thanks to an open and spacious attic, I was able to trace some of them to the rooms the lead to. A large cluster, however, disappear into a single hole in the attic floor and could not be traced easily. I've unhooked every cable from the cableco input, as I'm not planning on using local cable. Using a the continuity feature of my multimeter, I was able to trace each cable back to the room and jack it led to. I shorted the jack in each room, one at a time, using a paper clip. In the attic, the mutimeter would give me a positive reading on only the jack that was shorted.

Now I've got every phone line and every cable line located and labelled. Today I install a routing board in the attic which will allow me to hook up my attic antennae and route it to the specific jacks I want it's signal to go to. If I do every want to bring the cable company back, it will be simple to hook them into this routing board.

Tomorrow the Satellite dish gets installed. That's another tale. ;-)

Dave

David,

A low cost method of outputing all of your video sources to all of your TV's is:

a) connect all of your video sorces to your A/V receiver
b) buy a single channel stereo modulator
c) connect the VCR2 record outs to the inputs of the modulator
d) use the record out selector on the A/V receiver to choose which video source to output to the modulator

The major drawback of this arrangement is that you will only be able to view two video sources simultaneously, one in the theater and one throughout the rest of the home. However, with only two of you in the house it may suffice or at least will reduce the cost of all of the modulation channels in the interum.