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Overview
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We wanted to have audio available around the house and in the back yard primarily for background listening. Our first choice was about the appearance of the speakers. We decided that we wanted them to be as unobtrusive as possible, so we opted for inwall units rather than bookshelf or sat/sub speakers. You can see where we installed the speakers on this floor plan. The blue S's denote the location of the speakers. The kitchen speakers are mounted in the ceiling. The outdoor speakers are mounted under the eaves. The living room and guest room speakers are in the walls about 6 or 7 feet up. All of the interior speakers are painted the same color as the walls. They blend in pretty well and don't attract much attention to themselves.
We really just use this system to listen to CD's and occasionally to radio. Though there is already a receiver in the media room for the home theater, we have a separate receiver and CD player for home audio. The receivers aren't connected together in any way at the moment. The key to the system is the Niles RVL-6 Modular Multi-Room Controller. This slim box can accept up to 6 modules that provide either on/off or on/off and volume control. The output of the amp/receiver feeds into the RVL-6. You can run up to 6 sets of speakers from there. It does the impedance matching and volume control. There are two main ways to control the volume in a given zone - infrared and X10. We chose X10. The RVL-6 connects to a TW-523 X10 module. We have X10 wireless remotes spread around that can send on/off and volume up/down. This works pretty well, but X10 commands have a noticeable lag that makes adjusting the volume a bit clunky.
I did find a cool remote control device at SmartHome. It's basically a keychain sized remote that can learn X10 RF commands. It has four buttons which I programmed to be on, off, volume up, and volume down. It's a great size to have laying around. The full size X10 remotes can be used to adjust the volume in all the zones, but these are great for single room control. We opted for this rather than in-wall volume controls or IR sensors simply for appearance sakes. We probably could have hidden the IR sensors reasonably well, but this seemed like an adequate solution.
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Component List
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My system consists of the following:
If you have suggestion for other relevant discussion forums, let me know.
System Evolution
September 2000
- I just purchased an ARQ1 from AudioRequest. This is a pretty cool box that has an internal hard drive for storing music in MP3 form. It looks like a normal CD player and will play CD's as expected, but the normal operation involves ripping your CD's to the internal hard drive and playing them from there. Once you've got your CD's copied in, you don't ever have to touch them again. It has a small LCD display on the front, but displays a pretty nice UI on a connected TV or VGA monitor. The box is ethernet-enabled allowing it to get at CDDB data, stream music from other servers on the fly, and be remote controlled by a PC. I haven't had the unit very long, but it looks like it's going to be a winner. [9/17/00]
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Learned the hard way...
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- We really believed that we didn't want the whole house audio extending to the master bedroom. We imagined we would just use a separate system in there. Wrong! We definitely should have at least run wires to the master bedroom so that we'd have the choice. Now I'm going to have to crawl around under the floor or above the ceiling (neither have much space) to run more wires.
- I tried connecting the tape monitor output of the receiver to an aux input of the home theater receiver. I did this so I could listen to the CD player in the media room. This caused distortion in both systems that I couldn't get rid of, and belive me I tried. I think I'll get one of those distribution splitters to put between the CD player and the receivers so that both can be driven from it.
- In wall speakers just don't sound as good as the same priced traditional speaker. I guess this is obvious.
- I ran the wires from all of the remote speakers to a 2 gang box in the wall of the media room. This was not enough room for all of the necessary speaker connectors. Fortunately I left plenty of wire in the box so I mounted another 2 gang box right next to it and ran some of the speaker wires into it. That gave me the room I need for all of the speaker connections.
