What's the best and most economical way to hook up 6 sets of speakers for whole house sound?

best speaker system for kitchen image

mM

Okay hopefully I can explain this. Seems simple enough but let's see. We just built a new home and have 6 sets of speakers (with the speaker wire converging at one central location in the great room but no equipment there yet to bring sound to the speakers). We have sets in the kitchen, sunroom, rear deck, front porch, and 2 sets in the great room (with an extra speaker in that room (so a total of 5 speakers) for, I think, surround sound for our flat screen in that room). What's the easiest and most economical way to get these speakers powered up and running. I would like to be able to listen to different sets of speakers at the same time, but not necessarily all of the sets at once. I do not need to be listening to different things in different rooms although it might be nice to be able to use the surround sound to watch a movie in the great room while listening to music on the rear deck or something like that. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance.

Answer
What you are looking for is called distributed audio.

http://www.htd.com/Products/Whole-House-Audio

There are better systems but the HTD above is not bad. I use HTD for an eleven zone system using two of their 6 zone controllers and two 12 channel amplifiers.

A better system is Sonos. With Sonos you don't necessarily need to have all the wires coming to one location but that certainly doesn't hurt anything. With the Sonos you would use six zone players, one for each pair of speakers and a Zone bridge connected to your router. The Sonos can then access music from the internet and also any devices containing music you have shared on your network. You can control it with your iPhone or other smart phone pad etc. I have three Sonos zone players connected as sources to my HTD system but would like to eventually convert to 100% Sonos. http://www.sonos.com/

mk

What specs do I look for in buying wall mount speakers that take the least amount of power.?

Stephen

Our vacation home is off grid and controlling power consumption is important. Are there certain specs when buying speakers that should be looked at other then wattage.

Answer
Quite frankly you are worrying about nothing. The amount of extra line (AC wall outlet) power an inefficient speaker will use compared to an efficient speaker is negligible unless you are setting up an elaborate concert system. Lets say for instance you get yourself a set of Klipshchorns, one of the most efficient speakers ever made, and run them at high volume all day. Then the next day you swap in a pair of AR 18 speakers, an inefficient speaker by comparison, and run them all day at high volume. How much electricity did you save with the Klipschorns? Probably only enough to run a 65 watt light bulb for 10 minutes, if even that. Speakers do not consume much energy. Most of the electricity is used in the circuitry of the amplifier and that also is negligible compared to appliances like refrigerators, televisions, CRT computer monitors and kitchen appliances. If you really do want efficient speakers look for horn loaded speakers. The desirability of efficient speakers is that they simply distort less per given input and the amplifier will also create less distortion as it isn't working as hard. In the early days of Hi-Fi efficient speakers like the the Electrovoice Patrician, Altec Voice of the Theater and the aforementioned Klipschorn were in demand because amplifiers of that era were considered high power if they had a 40 watt rating. Now days that's considered low power. My big system has around 1,700 watts and even that is dwarfed by some setups. The demarcation of a speaker's efficiency is SPL -Sound Pressure Level. This is given as a decibel rating. An inefficient speaker will be in the 80 - 89 dB range. Mid-efficiency will be in the 90s. High efficiency is generally considered over 97 dB. Systems that are fully horn loaded (the woofer too) will be in the 100+ dB range. Again, our old friend the Klipschorn has a 105 dB rating and the old anecdote is that a 10 watt amplifier will power it to levels that will have the cops knocking on your door. But it's a big boy, at 175 Lbs and over 4' tall. That is the trade off. There is no way to fool the laws of physics. If you want efficiency and a good low bass output, speakers have to be big. Beware of the small ones, particularly the expensive little cubes.

Powered by Yahoo! Answers

Title Post: What's the best and most economical way to hook up 6 sets of speakers for whole house sound?
Rating: 98% based on 989 ratings. 5 user reviews.
Author: Yukie

Thanks For Coming To My Blog