AndreE wrote: > I do not own the house, but was involved into multiple planning projects > done by friends. Having relatively big apartment and having all my > equipment distributed across all rooms I would do it differently for my > place if I would do it again and from scratch. > The distribution of the equipment is nice in term of virtual > flexibility, and has some associated constrains. In my current plans I > consider to move most of my equipment into the locked from the eyes > cabinet where equipment is very centralized. Most of modern amplified > support network based management and you do not need to have IR remotes > laying everywhere. The only thing you would need to care across all > rooms would be the cabling for speakers � the rest somewhere in the > basement � easy to manage and replace. Rooms will be much cleaner from > the equipment boxes. > > Even if you decide to nave Logitech for a while � think about the > case: how many independent tracks you are going to listen across all > rooms? Would it be the case that each room has own music? What rooms > have to be independent for whatever cost? Would this system be able to > support such load (on the server side)? Would it be fine to have > management capability available via tablet? > > If the answer would be "most my rooms will be in sync mode" (for me this > is most likely scenario) � than I would go for less devices like > Touch, and by having them centralized you can leverage the power of > �centralizations�. > There are multiple amplifies on the market supporting 9.1/2+ modes and > they also have 2-3 rooms set-up capabilities. You will have just 3-4 > amplifiers in the list instead of 12. And this would be the same for > touches you would need to have � 3-4 instead of 12 in each room. I > would go for solution comparison with all pros and cons including the > cost factor. > Or simply might consider looking towards the professional sound > distribution solutions direction where the offering is even richer. > By moving into the central cabined solution you will have full > flexibility to have as many amplifiers and �music� distribution > systems as you need. Expansion / change will be less painful as if you > have all rooms separated. > In case of distributed solution, by having some devices failing you will > start losing rooms with no possibility to resolve/fix it easily without > replacing the whole system. For me this is one of the decisive questions > to answer before making a decision.
Interesting points. It's not uncommon in our house to have three different streams happening at the same time. Occasionally we have four. We rarely synchronise players. All of my content is in FLAC and my current server is more than capable of handling all of my existing client at the same time, including transcoding (only done as a test), so I'm not at all worried about that side. (In fact I'll probably be upgrading the server for the new house to adequately serve multiple video streams at the same time. Serving Squeezeboxes will be insignificant after the upgrade.) I have thought about centralised vs distributed systems and I can see some of the appeals of centralised. However, most of our planned locations will also be able to support other devices (e.g. PC or TV) through the same speakers and in this case a distributed amplification system makes more sense. (A couple of the systems will be connected through external DAC/processors and high-end amps.) I also like having a dedicated user interface to the players - while I do control the system using iPeng when I'm sitting down for a listening session, for casual use I just use the remotes/buttons. Faffing around with unlocking my phone/tablet, launching the application, selecting which player I want to control etc. is an annoyance. I also don't want to have to buy my kids phones/ipods/tablets so that they can control the music. The only system that supports this, as far as I can see, is Squeezebox, and this implies having a distributed system. (As a minor aside, I also like having clocks around the house that I don't have to change between GMT and DST!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MarkBennett's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58063 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96188
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