What started all this at our house is SageTV. They have now sold out to Google so I sold my SageTV extenders and put in PC's at all TV's to "future proof" the hardware. SageTV does not sync music between players so another solution was needed. I opted for Squeeze whatever to play music and LMS to manage the music and only the music. SageTV does pictures and video very well - it will also do music but will not sync between players and is somewhat difficult to use.
Remember my system is entirely software based, no hardware players. One requirement from my far better half was NO BOXES in the rooms, this included speakers, players etc.. All our speakers are in ceiling except for two rooms and are for back ground music only, not for serious listening. We have a nice setup in the family room with a sound bar and wireless sub (2.1) for TV/music and we have what we call our Fun Room, 65" TV, floor speakers, playstation, etc. I've tailored the acoustics in the Fun Room for serious music although I am really the only one who really sits down and listens to music for the sake of listening to music, I like to listen loud and for usually 1-2 hours at a time. At one time we had the entire main living area (kitchen, living, dining, and family room) on one amp. This ended up being a problem with the gang wanting to watch a ball game in the family room so I split it off leaving the rest on a single amp. I did put volume control in the living room and dining room, the kitchen volume is controlled by software and affects the other two room. Not ideal but once set it has not been touched for many months, again it is for back ground music only, not serious listening. There are two media servers in the basement, one for SageTV and one for music only (Logitech Media Server) because I had a computer that was just sitting of the shelf. I built several Foxconn NTA3700 computers for SageTV extenders and for the music in other rooms. These are not the cheapest devices but are compact and easily stacked on a shelf. I think the Raspberry could be a good choice for this also and is far cheaper. There are many ways to accomplish this task as abuti pointed out, it just depends on how much time and money you want to spend and the amount of boxes in the rooms you are willing to live with, we did not want any additional boxes (speakers, players, etc.) in any of the other rooms. Is my setup perfect, absolutely not. A stranger cannot turn on/off, change the music or the volume without instruction, it is not in perfect sync between zones but close enough at back ground listening levels and the ceiling speakers lack dynamic range but again for back ground music they work quite well. One thing to point out if you gang several rooms together on one amp you must use a impendence matching device otherwise you take a chance of burning up an amp or blowing speakers. I used an ASD Audio ISS4 unit for my kitchen/living/dining rooms. MrEb wrote: > Thanks Jim, that is good to know. > In particular there is an open plan area (kitchen, dining & living room) > that I would particularly like to have in sync, its not likely the > speakers there would ever play different tunes at the same time so I > might look at connecting those to one Amp. It would mean though by > consolidating them into one zone it would be either all on or off which > I'm not so sure about. > > It might be something I'll have to play around with a bit to see if I is > much of an issue in my case. > > Can you tell me if you are using speakers connected to each computer or > are they in ceiling or wall speakers? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jimbrandon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=57645 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98282 _______________________________________________ diy mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/diy
