ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Voice - Data - Video Discussion Whole house sound.

Have a house with rough speaker wiring in all main rooms. The wiring is like this. Each Volume Control has a main feed run back to panel. From each VC is a L & R spker feed. From the TV/amp area there is a single 4w speaker wire fed from there to the panel.

Question is....will the system work properly if I junction all the wires together in the basement and add V.C and speakers? Will the amp be able to handle different loads, or if all the VC's were being used?

Look into some of the products here, like WCN-12. http://www.russound.com/speaker_selectors.htm

E57....thanks for putting me on the right track. Would the current home theatre amp used for the great room surround sound run the rest of the house speakers adequately, or would a separate amp be required?

Cost savings and simplicity is an issue here for this project.

As a simpler option, anybody know if this is possible, since 4 sets of speakers are required at the moment throughout the house, could we purchase a 6 channel amp and hook up each pair of speakers to each channel?



[This message has been edited by Sandro (edited 04-09-2005).]

No, this is what you need to use http://www.russound.com/pdf/MANUALS/SS-Series%20manual.pdf

You will also need to a separate amplifier to drive it and use their recommended volume controls.

-Hal

[This message has been edited by hbiss (edited 04-09-2005).]

I went into the importance of impedance matching, and other stuff in my original post, but it didn't make it, clicked over to something else, and when I came back all of it was gone.

Most of the circuitry, of the items Hal and I posted are the same, except that the one Hal put up is in a box, and has selection switches. Which makes for a nice clean install... And since impedance matching is the idea here, using recommended volume controls also affects this. And a seperate amplifier is recomended, as a theater type 4.1, or 6.1 does some wierd things with adding reverb, and other effects to the channels, not appropriate for use in other rooms, outside of having limited power for each channel.

Using a 6 channel amp would aslo work, or if you had run some control wire to the VC locations, a multi-zone/multi-source system would be even better - Why spend less? A few dollars more and you can can control the whole works. But some planning early must be done, as it is a "System".

Another source for this type of equipment is Niles, and there is often debate over which is better quality.....
http://www.nilesaudio.com/index.html

As per usual....the forum came through again.... I picked up a speaker selector and hooked up the speakers and all is well.

My local stereo store had a speaker selector made by Monster Cable which looks and I am confident acts similar to the units from Russound and others.
http://www.monstercable.com/productPage.asp?pin=1423

Thanks for the help guys.

Sandro.