I suspect that if the original post had read 'I'm about to renovate an old house and am considering running speaker wire ...' (rather than 'I recently renovated an old house and ran in-wall speaker cables...'), the consensus view would have been 'don't bother running the speaker wire.' So maybe it dependes on how much you are determined to use the speaker wire now that you've run it?
Said another way if the design question was: I'm about to renovate a house and want to have music avalable in a number of rooms/zones and I don't want to have traditional stereo components visible in each room/zone, how should I do it? Then the likely (or at least my) answer would be something like: You get the most flexibility (ie, can play different music in every room/zone) by putting a SB (of some sort) in each room along with amplification (of some sort) and speakers. Given the reasonably high quality of 'powered' speakers (many threads on this topic) and tiny footprint of the SBR you you can accomplish unobtrusiveness pretty well in any room/zone where that matters. On the other hand, if you are absolutely committed to the basement audio closet there's no reason why you can't have either a 6-zone amp and then one or some SBs (that would be one or some 'audio-in' components to that amp OR as many SB+Amp combos as you want to have separate and simultaneous music playing somewhere in the house. Just be clear if you want to play different music simultaneously in different zones you need as manay SBs as you want different music streams: one SB will let you play one music stream in one, some or all zones; but if you want to play 6 different music streams simultaneously you'll need 6 SBs somewhere in the equation. I've got both situations. In my regular house I've got a bunch of SBs with a bunch of amplification/speakers combinations. I also have a weekend house that happened to come with a built-in multi-zone system with in-ceiling speakers and in-wall control units running back to a central closet with a 6-zone amp. I have 2 SBs connected as 'audio-in' devices which allows any zone to play one of the two SBs; that is I have a max of two music streams, though either stream can be played any one, some or all zones at a given time. That setup is a little goofy and I certainly wouldn't have done it if the built-in stuff wasn't already there but it works ok. (fwiw, the built-in system was orders of magnitude more expensive than a 6-zone with 6 SBs setup would have been; it's also a bit more complicated since one has to turn on the zone using the in-wall control pad and then select music using a SBC--like I said, a little goofy). -- cshaida boom sbd + Rockit5s (powered) speakers sb3 + AudioEngine 2s (powered) speakers sb2 + Sony receiver + klipsch bookshelf speakers sb3 + Sonic TAmp + Cambridge SW speakers sb3 + m:Audios (powered) speakers (decommissioned auditron w/ late, lamented 'knob') ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cshaida's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1981 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58724 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
