Distributed AV in the home

[Amp34]

We are are currently in the process of purchasing a house. All going well we will essentially own a shell I can install lots of goodies into!

Ideally I want to do all this as cheaply as possible but this kind of thing doesn't scream "cheap", especially if you want reasonable sound quality...

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I'm tempted to install a matrix system for HDMI over Cat but not sure if it's really worth it at the moment as we will probably only be streaming content to a couple of TV's/projectors and we don't do cable TV.

I do want to put the cabling in for it however, going to a central point, just in case I do (or the next people do). There seems to be two different types, one that needs two Cat5/6 cables and ones that need only one? Is it a brand specific thing?

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I also want to install ceiling speakers in several rooms. I'm currently anticipating 5 zones, but the other half may want one or two more! Zones I'm anticipating are:

Garden - 2-4 speakers?
Living/Dining/Kitchen area - Open plan ish - 3?
Master Bedroom - 12x12 ft - 2?
Rec Room - approx 30x14ft - 2-4?
Garage - away from house so probably seperate system - 2

Possible other - Bathroom -1

There seem to be a multitude of options available for this, including multi zone amps, Sonos Connect:Amps, Apple Airport Express(?). Ideally I want a system that I can adjust the volume and pick source and songs easily from every room, either using an App or a wall system.

Music would be coming from spotify/streaming radio and personal music collection stored on a Synology Nas. There are two of us in the house and we both currently have iPhones and iPads. I'm also not sure how much speaker power I would need in each room.

The multi zone amps that fit the bill best would be 6 zone 12 channel amps I believe. From the research I have done I would then need to connect something like the (or several) Airport Express to it and use that as a source?

I like the idea of a Sonos for the seperate Garage system (the garage is about 70 feet from the house), or at least something similar. I'm not sure they would be economical for the rest of the house though? Do they also need be visible or can I hide them away. I understand they have a good app though and can be used as both a source and amp?

As you can see I'm floundering around a little here - it's not really my forte - but any input would be great. If you have a system I'd love to know what setup you have.

TLDR: Spec me an in ceiling speaker system.

 

[lucid]

Systems using Cat cable.......

The stuff you've mentioned where boxes use either 1 or 2 Cat cables are called 'Baluns', and these are an alternative to having long audio and video cables. Specifically they overcome the losses of long cables, they help to avoid noise issues, and they provide a way of carrying a wide variety of signals via a low cost cable. What baluns don't do is turn the signal into something that can co-exist with data traffic via a home network. In short, they don't IP-ise the signal. So baluns are really a point-to-point system replacing long and/or multiple AV cables.

You could have your AV sources connected to a HDMI matrix, and then via the matrix send a signal to one/some/all rooms (eg Sky BBC1 HD to all rooms), but if you do it like this then everyone sees the same thing playing at the same time. Whoever has the Sky remote controls what every other room sees.

The HDMI matrix idea works fine for a self contained area such as an open plan living space or for a one person/two person dwelling, but I think you'd be a bit challenged to make it work well for a family home where several people all want to do their own thing at the same time. For that, you should really think more along the lines of a structured wiring system that accommodates the limitations of certain technologies (free-to-air TV, Sky) while at the same time not hindering more flexible technologies such as streamed content from the house library or the 'net.

The wiring should be thought of in layers. The bottom layer is the basic off-air (RF) distributed backbone; for most people that's Freeview, maybe FM/DAB, and subscription TV. The next layer is a basic data network. This will accommodate streamed content and access to the house media libraries. The final layer is any specialised wiring to do with signals that can't go via either the RF or data network; so that's any Cat cables between baluns, speaker wires and anything else that doesn't fit elsewhere.

Planning the wiring goes hand in hand with planning the various bits of tech that will hang off it in each room.

If all you need is distributed audio, then I'd strongly suggest Sonos. For the things that are on your wants/needs list it ticks all those boxes very easily. You can achieve some of those things cheaper, but not all, and not with the ease of use that Sonos brings. The alternatives you've listed such as Airport Express are fine for single room playback, but can't do true multi-room as a standard feature, so you can't easily have AC/DC in the Rec Room and 1D in the kids room while streaming Spotify in the kitchen and the footy results in the bathroom. There's some workarounds, but you need to be prepared to be the "Tech' on call 24/7" if you expect others to play.

What speakers you use will have some impact on the structure of how those speakers are driven. Good in-ceiling speakers have both high fidelity and high efficiency. This means they don't need masses of power to drive them, so you can afford to lose some power in longer speaker wires to have all the amplification located centrally. It also means they sound far more like a proper 2 channel Hi-Fi than a mini/micro system. The catches are cost and treble roll off. A good 6"-6.5" in-ceiling stereo pair is £250-£300+. Running long speaker cables means there's a softening of the treble due to cable capacitance. Better quality speakers have treble boost adjustment, whereas cheaper speakers don't.

An average quality pair of 5"-5.25" in-ceiling speakers from a recognised speaker brand will cost around £120-£160 per pair. Below this is the sort of gear you might see on the auction site. It's often commercial in-ceiling being sold as suitable for domestic use. Prices typically range from £10-£40 each and you get what you pay for. I tested a couple of pairs of £15 and £30 each speakers. They worked but sounded thinner, phasey and vague, a bit like highly compressed MP3. For non-essential areas I'd consider them adequate for low level background listening.

Remember, you'll need to budget for fire hoods to go with any speakers being installed below occupied rooms.

If you decide to run a 12 channel amp then you'll be spending anything from £1200-£1600 on that plus the cost of source players to run 6x stereo pairs. An alternative might be Sonos Connect Amp's for those areas where only in-ceiling speakers will do, and then Sonos Play 1/3/5 speakers where in-ceiling isn't so essential.

 

[Amp34]

Thanks for the reply.

My plan is to colour code the Cat cable, Red (for example) for network, Blue for video and grey for any automation I do. That way there is no chance of me plugging the wrong wire into the wrong network... And hopefully easy to understand for the next people as well.

There are only two people in the house so many of the issues shouldn't be a problem, which is actually why I'm probably just going to install the cables and not the matrix, at least yet. My thinking is we will have free to air, streamed content and maybe a Blu Ray player, all going to one TV and one projector/large TV (in different rooms). Not sure it's worth it for £1000 on the matrix, especially when the vast majority will be streamed through a couple of Amazon Fire boxes!

WRT the Sonos system, they thing that's putting me off about them is the fact they will cost about £2k, just for the amps. I'm also not sure how we could control all of them with a tablet/phone. Is it just a case of the Sonos app listing all 5 and you name them to the room?

Having Sonos would help in many ways but I'm also not sure where to put them. I assume they need to be accessible (to turn on and off) but just stacking them in the media room/cupboard seems a waste as the same cable length would be needed as a 6 zone amp. For example I couldn't store the Amp in the bathroom.

My understanding with using the 12 channel amp is that you would then plug multiple Airport expresses into the amp to get your multi channel. It does seem a bit messier than the songs but it would be cheaper and (at a guess) the expresses would be controlled by phone and we could have one each. It would also be more expandable in the future.

Do you have any recommendations for in ceiling speakers that would fit the rooms I mentioned above? I've been looking around and a few US only companies keep popping up (the house is in North America) but I know little about more worldwide companies and their products at the moment. Same with the Amp.

Any non background music will be played through dedicated speakers, for example I'm going to eventually install a 7.1 system made up of wall/floor speakers with the projector/large TV and the second TV will just be playing through a sounder or integrated speakers.

 

[lucid]

Colour coding is a good idea. You should also draw up a written guide if you want the system to have value in the property when it is sold.

There might be only two people in the house now, but what about the future when it has new owners? If it were me or my recommendations to a client then I'd go with networked media players capable of playing your home rips of Blu-rays and DVDs. I'd still have a BD player for the main lounge as a source to the TVs and projector, but I'd feed that in to an AV amp with twin outputs (1 for TV with audio pass through, 1 for projector), then split the TV output with a 1:2 distribution amp to feed both TVs. Install a Cat balun with IR pass-back for the remote TV or investigate whether CEC will work through your chosen balun. Go with long HDMI cables for the gear located closer to the AV amp.

Sonos might be relatively expensive compared to Airport Express, but it does do a heck of a lot more and far easier. It's also far better understood by the general public as a de facto choice for multi-room, so it has greater value when it comes to selling the property. That's a good negotiating tool. If you're not getting your price then you can always say you'll take the Sonos with you; you might find that the potential buyer really wants it once they realise it's at risk of being removed.

None of the players or speakers need access to be switched on/off. They auto sense to commands and signals. The only time they really need to be accessed is for the initial pairing and if you need to do the same in the future. From that point of view then you can leave then in cupboards. I have clients with Sonos players installed in kitchen cabinets, wardrobes, under stairs etc.

For bathrooms, unless there's a requirement for it to be a completely separate zone from the bedroom then I tend treat the bedroom and en-suite as a single zone. i.e. what plays in the bathroom also plays in the bedroom. This is achieved with speakers that have 8 Ohm / 4 Ohm switching to allow two sets (or one pair plus a single point stereo) to be run from a stereo amp channel. If a Sonos Connect Amp is used then it's installed in the bedroom. It doesn't need to be in the bathroom at all, nor should it really be installed there due to heat and moisture.

Controlling Sonos is a piece of cake with smart phones. All the zones are listed and named. You control one/some/all zones by use of grouping. So say you wanted to control the entire ground floor and garden, you'd simply form a temporary group by adding the zones via the controller app. Room by room volume is individually controllable, so you can have some areas louder and others quieter in the group. Then there's Master Volume which adjusts the entire grouped are volume with a single key stroke. Zones can be added or dropped at will. The remaining zones are still free to be operated independently of also grouped as 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc groups depending on the size of your network and the number of players owned.

Using a smart phone as a controller is as easy as downloading the app (iOS and Android) and you can also use the phone as a media source too. As for expansion, unless you live in a mansion then it's very unlikely that you would reach a limit of the number of players that can be added, so expandability really isn't an issue.

The US market is served by brands such as Proficient, Emphasys, Polk, Klipsch, Speakercraft and others which originate in the continental US. UK brands such as B&W, Monitor Audio, KEF are also available there. SOme of the more niche brands that I use are only available in Europe.

 

[Amp34]

Is there any benefit of using HDMI cable over CAT for the projector, other than cost? My first thought was to connect the projector with CAT as I really want to hide all the AV equipment in a seperate room, which will probably be too far for HDMI.

Sonos does look very promising and does appear to do all that would be needed. I 'll have a look into it in more detail. I guess I could easily set up a console for the whole system just using a cheap android tablet as well, if I wanted something physical on the wall.

The bathroom isn't actually attached to the Bedroom, but is right next door. Setting up as a single zone is not something I'm keen on as (for example) it wouldn't work when the other half was having a shower and I was still in bed. However if I attached a nice three way switch between the amp and speakers that may solve that issue. I think something like a single stereo in the bathroom and a single stereo or twin singles in the bedroom (12'x12') and then the switch between the rooms so you can choose to route the sound between either the bedroom or the bathroom, or both (I assume you'd lose half the volume - or is this where 8/4 Ohm switching comes in?) would work.

There seems to be lots of options for Polk speakers, along with a few KEF and Yamaha speakers. I'm sure I could probably get many of the others though. Do you have any links for websites that review in ceiling speakers? I guess the biggest question I have now is what sort of quality do I want. Would you also recommend sticking with only one speaker brand or is mixing and matching fairly common (individual rooms).

 

[Minstadave]

I was going to suggest Sonos too, we have 3 players at the moment with a Deezer lossless subscription and it's very impressive.

And a tablet on the wall would work nicely. I was planning to do something similar but actually there's always a phone/tablet/PC close by so I've never needed to.

As you've noticed you can also buy the Sonos amp which you can connect ceiling speakers to for rooms where you don't want to have a plugged in system (like bathrooms).

 

[Amp34]

I take it you have sonos speakers? One thing I thought of earlier was how seamless is the sonos system when going form one zone to another? For example when moving from the living room to the bedroom/downstairs can you just flick from one zone to another halfway through a song, like you would with the 12 channel amp or do you have to turn one zone off and then find the song you were listening to in the other zone?

 

[Minstadave]

Yup just add the zone to the one playing and the music caries on, all synced nicely.

My setup is made up of a Play:5 in the kitchen, a second Play:5 in the lounge that does the TV audio too and a Play:1 in the bedroom.

The Play:1 is my favourite. Sounds great for its size.

Having the TV connected to the Play:5 means I can stream the TV audio round the house which is good when I'm busy.

 

[lucid]

Is there any benefit of using HDMI cable over CAT for the projector, other than cost? My first thought was to connect the projector with CAT as I really want to hide all the AV equipment in a seperate room, which will probably be too far for HDMI.

For the projector, then th HDMI cable advantage is mainly cost, though you might also find that things such as HDMI-CEC work better through it too.

For TVs then HDMI has a big advantage over Cat balun if you want audio return (ARC) to work. You'll need to search hard for baluns that support this.

HDMI doesn't have things all its own way though. Two Cat 6 are more likely to be future-proof if we ever get to 8K, but that's speculation at this point.

The bathroom isn't actually attached to the Bedroom, but is right next door. Setting up as a single zone is not something I'm keen on as (for example) it wouldn't work when the other half was having a shower and I was still in bed. However if I attached a nice three way switch between the amp and speakers that may solve that issue. I think something like a single stereo in the bathroom and a single stereo or twin singles in the bedroom (12'x12') and then the switch between the rooms so you can choose to route the sound between either the bedroom or the bathroom, or both (I assume you'd lose half the volume - or is this where 8/4 Ohm switching comes in?) would work.

You won't lose half the volume, but you will give the amp a much harder task if you use a basic speaker switch box that simply adds one set of speakers to another. What you should use is an "impedance matching speaker switch box". This uses an internal transformer to balance the load so that the amp sees an 8 Ohm impedance load regardless of whether one pair of speakers are connected or two. In a nutshell this stops your amp blowing up. Russound do something perfect for the job. It's their SDB-2.1

There seems to be lots of options for Polk speakers, along with a few KEF and Yamaha speakers. I'm sure I could probably get many of the others though. Do you have any links for websites that review in ceiling speakers? I guess the biggest question I have now is what sort of quality do I want. Would you also recommend sticking with only one speaker brand or is mixing and matching fairly common (individual rooms).

I tend to focus on price/performance. That means I look at the specs and the application and choose the 'best in class' product for the job. Having said that, you also need to bear in mind the way that different materials affect sound and also how brands 'voice' their speakers. For example, I find KEF in-ceilings to have too recessed a top end in their entry and midrange products for my own liking. So mixing them with something brighter in an adjoining area would create quite a sonic step as one walked through the house.

In the end a lot depends on your budget. See if you can find a single brand that covers all the bases. If not, then look outside that brand for products to fill the gaps.

 

[Amp34]

First off, thanks Lucid for that last reply, as usual very useful!

I'm now much further down the line with the designs for the house, although unfortunately not yet moving into the house. I now have some pretty set plans for the basement and rest of the house which means I can actually get to the final stages of planning the AV!

I've taken a lot of what was said earlier in to consideration and I think I'll be using a combination of Sonos Amps and players for the audio part. The current feeling is:

Rec Room - 26x16ft - A Sonos Connect: Amp and 4 mono(?) ceiling speakers evenly spread (see second image)
Bathroom 1 - 9x6ft - Sonos Play 1
Bathroom 2 - 10x6ft - Sonos Play 1
Bedroom - 12x12ft - Sonos Play 3/5(?)
Office - 12x10ft - Sonos Play 3/5(?) (see below)
Garden - Sonos Connect: Amp and speakers

The area I'm undecided on at the moment is the Living/Dining/Kitchen area. It's semi open plan and I'm not sure whether to go for a Sonos Amp and ceiling speakers like downstairs or move to a selection of Sonos Plays. The latter would be cheaper but I assume the former would provide more even sound distribution?

I guess I could install 4 ceiling speakers - one in the kitchen, one dining and two in above the sofa, or I could stick to a couple of play 5's, or I could buy 4 Play 1s and dot them around the area, one by the TV, two at either ends of the bookshelf and one in the kitchen. Any opinions from those with Sonos would be great, thanks.

All that said, perhaps one/two Play 3/5s downstairs in the Rec room may be a better option. If I build a couple of shelves for them they can be out of the way. Would two Play 3/5s provide better sound quality than 4 in ceiling speakers? I haven't yet actually listened to any of the Sonos stuff. It's on my to do list..

It looks like if I get an Airport Express and plug it into a Play device then I can also Airplay sound from my Mac. Is it as simple as I'm assuming? From a windows computer it sounds more complicated. I assume the easiest option is just to buy a Play 5 for the office and use the line in?

So TL: DR -
Sonos Play:1s reasonable for small rooms?
What Sonos Plays for bedroom/office?
Multiple Sonos Devices rather than Sonos Connect:Amp and in ceiling speakers for two main rooms?
Best way to be able to use Sonos as speakers for Windows computer?

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Back to the distributed visual - I'm now erring towards HDMI to both TV locations. With HDMI 2.0 it looks like I will be able to get 4k over the distances I need so I could store all my AV stuff in a cupboard (Green circle in image below) and then put an HDMI cable through the walls to the main TV/Projector location (it's either TV or projector downstairs). For upstairs the TV will be virtually on top of the cupboard. If I stick a couple of Cat 6 cables along with the HDMI I should get a degree of future proofing if I need more bandwidth later on.

Slowly getting there I think!

 

[Hobbsie]

may i ask what software that is?

 

[Amp34]

http://floorplanner.com

I think I should start getting commission from the owners of that website.