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Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?
abrinton asks: "I just went into escrow on a new house. Of course, first thoughts are to the sound system. I don't want to wire. Anything. I've got a wireless network, so computers are all sorted. But what do I do for sound? I need ideas for a centrally controlled sound system that can use 802.11g for transport. I'd like to have the same music everywhere, or better still, options to play different things in different rooms. I've got access to tons of old PIII laptops, wireless gear, old computers, sound cards, etc to make this work. Has anyone got any ideas or done anything like this?"
I am sure someone else will mention it, but I use iTunes exclusively for music throughout our home. A central server with our entire 10k song plus collection ripped onto it resides in the study with an old Powerbook connected up to the main stereo system in the house that spins out the tunes for most to hear (A Mac Mini would be perfect for this task). Others who want to listen to something else in differing parts of the house (or outside) can also tie into iTunes and listen simultaneously to completely independent streams, all wirelessly. In fact, before they moved, my next door neighbors used to stream from our server as well.
I don't know if PIII laptops can run iTunes or not, but my six year old Powerbook spins tunes with no problem whatsoever. For those truly particular about their music ( or those with high end home stereo systems possessing digital audio connectors ), Powermac G5's and the new 17in Powerbook also have digital audio out. Combine that with Apple's lossless audio format and you have some kick ass tunage available without ever again having to search through your CD collection for that particular song. A cheaper option is to purchase Airport Express units for differing parts of your house that each have an audio out and can plug into any available power socket.
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Well, if you are serious about sound, you really should go for wired solutions. If you can't go for wires, then you should consider some good (and expensive) wireless sound speakers. If you -finally- are just thinking of PC-like sounds, well, I think I can't help. Sorry. PS: I'd stress you to go for the wired solutions. And wire the speakers with MonsterCable or similar. drop the cheap car-audio stuff. Ciao!
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Of course, first thoughts are to the sound system.
:-)
Geek.
This is so easy, I don't even know why you had to post it to Slashdot.
So, here it is, how to have the same music play in every room in your house, in 3 easy steps:
1.) Buy stereo system with very large speakers
2.) Put stereo system in one room of your house. Orient speakers so they face toward the rest of the house.
3.) Turn volume up all the way.
If you still have some "dead spots" in the house where the sound doesn't reach, you'll need my specidal educational pamphlet "Sledgehammers and You," available for only $9.95, plus shipping and handling.
When you say "new house" do you mean that it's being built for you right now? If so, forget the wireless idea immediately. Go to Home Depot, buy boxes of Cat5/6 cable, spools of coax, and heavy duty speaker cable. Pick out a closet somewhat close to your living/family room and make it the distribution hub for your new home. Get your butt down to the construction site and run coax, network, and speaker wires to all the rooms of the house from this central location. It also wouldn't hurt to run RCA, S-Video, and maybe even VGA or DVI from the closet to the expected location of your main TV.
:)
Any wires that you do not plan to use right away can be left inside the walls (Take pictures of EVERYTHING before they sheetrock the place, you'll be glad you did later when you want to find the wires!). The rest of the stuff should have standard boxes that you can add the appropriate wall plates to later.
Smarthome is your friend for a lot of the finishing touches. I recommend a box like the ChannelPlus that allows you to insert your own audio/video on an unused cable channel. I did that and now I can watch DVDs or Movies coming from the computer in the closet on any TV in the house. ChannelPlus thoughtfully has IR devices that feed back up the coax line to the source so your remote controls will activate everything hidden in the closet.
I could go on and on about this- I've done it for my current home and will be building another home this year. I've already started thinking about improvements to my original layout
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Apple makes a neat little device that you can use to stream music to and hooks up to your stereo. This combined with iTunes is a great way to play music all over the house.
You might look into the Sonos system (previously discussed on /. It's wireless and allows unique content at each location. I saw an early demo and it was very impressive. Cost might be a factor, but the system and controllers have a very nice look and feel.
> I don't want to wire. Anything.
I suggest batteries.. a lot of them.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You put down money for a NEW house. Studs still in the walls? Where wiring up speakers and such is a piece of cake. Putting in a full sound system in every room (you can do it yourself for free) is pretty simple and easy to do...
But you'd rather drop a big clunky P3 in the room with a wireless card.... why? I see no advantage in it. Wire up speakers in every room. All wires go to computer room. Wires then attached to a single machine that manipulates everything.
But, being a computer geek and having a buncha P3 boxes lying about is what makes you happy, knock yourself out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There's a wireless system out there that already does this: Sonos.com. You can check out the review at Engadget and I believe they won an award at CES. plus it was on Queer Eye, I think. It has a pretty damn sweet looking wirelsss controller with a color LCD screen.
Roku Labs has a neat solution.
What you need to do is go ahead and send me all of those PIII laptops you have available, and I'll configure all of them for you and send them back... I promise! While you're at it, you might as well send me the sound cards and wireless gear, too. Do you visit ebay very often? No? Excellent...
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
I've been playing with this problem for a couple of years now. The problem is that sound streaming over IP is basically impossible to sync properly. As mentioned above, it's pretty simple to stream different streams to each room but if you want all the rooms playing the same thing, each will be off by a few parts of a second. It drove me crazy. We just ran audio over Cat5e everywhere from a central system in the living room. Home Depot's got punch down blocks that convert Cat5e into an unamplified audio output RCA jack.
So it turns out that this is harder that you might think. Getting different wireless audio into different rooms isn't too bad. It's mostly a function of throughput. But getting the SAME wireless audio is into different rooms and keeping it in sync is a surprisingly difficult.
I have the SlimDevices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com/), and it works great at the first task, but only moderately well at the second. There's a new company called Sonos (http://www.sonos.com/) that just released their product which does both very well.
I had a chance to beta-test the product and it really is as good as described. It's Linux-based, but not open-source. It utilizes a proprietary mesh-network running on top of 802.11g and it worked flawlessly in my three zone setup. All three zones could play high-bitrate audio in perfect sync with no drops.
The downside is that it is fairly expensive. If you don't need sync'd audio, I might go with a cheaper option. But if you do, I've yet to find anything that can top Sonos.
Get the RoadTrip FM transmitter from Griffin(i have one; work's great). It's for your car, but the FM transmitter detaches and connects to your PC, too. Connect it to your PC and start the music. Use cheap FM stereo's throughout your home.
r ip /
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/roadt
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I did this same thing a few years back in a dorm.
I had a server in a closet, multiple machines playing at the same time.
The problem ends up being where you want to put the power (as in Receivers/Speakers.)
Unless you want really bad sound quality, and buy lots of speakers... Anything wireless, laptops, pcs, especially speakers, need a power oulet.
Long story short: You're limited by receivers and power outlets not wires. Continuing to try to be wireless is pointless.
Just run the wires through the a/c vents & put the speakers in the vents. It will still sound better and require less work than a wireless setup. Plus..., no visible wires...
-JT
If you don't want to belive me, and since I'm just some schmo on the internet you shouldn't, do a search on Monster Cable at either of these websites, and read the consensus opinions.
Avs Forum
HDTVoice
If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable
I had similar aspirations for a central sound server, but found that the latency issue can be hard to get by. If you want to use wireless, you're going to have to have independent decoding at each wireless access point. Problem is, each device is going to decode at it's own slightly different rate. The result is speakers in adjacent rooms that are a millisecond or two off. If you happen to be standing where you can hear both sets of speakers, the sound is going to be pretty nasty. Its difficult to get around this any way other than having the wires all come from the same box.
I wrote a little Java app (actually three apps) that allow me to stream audio over the network. The cool part (well, I think it's cool, anyway) is that it's in three pieces: a server, player, and controller. The server serves the files, the player plays it out to audio, and the controller (you guessed it) lets you set up playlists and jobs from a central location (there's little point in streaming audio to another room if you have to walk there to start it up). You can play multiple jobs to different rooms at the same time.
My wife uses this to stream music (in ogg and mp3 format) from my server downstairs to a Linux box in the living room I built for this purpose. She controls it from a GUI on a Windows box on the kitchen counter. I've tested it over wireless and it works fine.
I was thinking of putting this up on SourceForge - if anyone's interested let me know (msimpson at abel solutions dot com).
Read my keyboard review.
It has its issues, but the Squeezebox works well in the Living Room because it's unobtrusive and self-contained: you don't need a computer or a TV to control it. In the Office, the Airport Express is perfect because it can be controlled by any computer in the room, and being an office, there are plenty of them.
The biggest downfall, actually, is the wireless. Wireless just isn't as reliable as wired. Once every few weeks, I'll find that one of my base stations needs to be power cycled. Sometimes all of them do. And this is something that's a pain for my wife, who just wants to listen to music.
The problem is worse in the Living Room, which is close to the kitchen, which contains the microwave. As you know, microwaves interfere with 802.11. That's not a big deal when you're surfing the web, but it sucks to have your music drop everytime you make a bag of popcorn.
This problem is only going to get worse when sharing movies starts becoming possible. Ethernet totally has the bandwidth for this. Wireless does not.
It's a pain, for sure, but now's the best time to do it.
Ok, this is a "NO BRAINER".... get a Mac Mini ($499), and a AirPort Express with AirTunes ($129) for each room youd like to have music streamed to. If you dont want wires, then purchase seperate wireless audio speakers (5.1 ch wireless audio packages can be had for $199). So, $330 per room as clients with a $500 server. Did I mention is looks great too.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Do some research. There is no reason that wireless cannot transmit sound as well or better than wires. (After all, look at the wireless microphones used on all sound stages.) There have been transmitters to send audio from the sound system to remote speakers for years. Even go visit Radio Shack, check with Bose, or take a look at the audio magazines. Are you an audiophile? If so, be aware that each room will have different characteristics, even with the same speakers, and we still have to deal with that "sweet" zone. Large wire cables are indeed best for the connection from the amplifier to the speakers, but only because low speaker impedance requires a lot of current for any power levels. (Power=I^2*R, where I is current and R is the speaker impedance in ohms) Also large wires reduce the inductance which can cause some delay for the highest frequencies, but unlikely that you will hear it. I expect that the computers can provide you with what you need, but again, remember that the computer systems require amplified speakers.
You can definitely do cheaper than a slimserver (though mine is on its way).
The
NetGear MP101 can be had for ~$75 after rebate at your local Big Box Electronics Store. Note, though, that the experiences with this product range from miserable to acceptable, largely because of weak wireless capability (it works for some, not others) and a flaky server software package.
The slim, on the other hand, has a fairly amazing open package with some awesome plugins developed by the community. The downside, though, is that it's not compatible with UPnP (which the MP101 is), making alternative servers, like Twonkyvision
useless.
Why am I switching to the slim, even with the higher price (3x)? Two reasons: first, the open server software - perl based! - means that I'll get features I really dig and not get stuck without answers. Second, the MP101 can only really do radio streams if you pay a one time? $20 fee OR monkey around considerably. While the service is pretty nice during the trial period, I'd prefer to not pay for something I can do for free.
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.
There are several websites on converting laptops into "picture frames" http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/023922 2&tid=222&tid=1,
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.JunktopRevival
Which you could modify slightly to add built in powered speakers and hang one in each room.
- Mike
Honestly, you'd rather have a bunch of ugly, old computer equipment sitting around (and plugged into the wall no less) in every room in your house then put in wireing? Are you planning on buying high-fidelity amps and good speakers for every room too?
As much as I hate apple, just buy an Ipod and cary it around with you if you can't stand to be stuck in just one room listening to music.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Learn to sing. If bandwidth is a problem, hum or whistle. All three formats go with you from room to room, and the hands-free interface is amazingly intuitive.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Install Slimserver (http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html) on a central server with all your music. Put a P3 laptop (or some other machine) with wireless in every room you will want music. Run SoftSqueeze (http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/) on each client, connecting to the server. Get a PDA with wireless and use Slimserver's built-in handheld skin to control your music.
Done!
-ZA
Pros:
Cons:
What, me worry?
If you have a network, and a stack 'o PIII's then you have what you need. It doesn't really matter what kind of network, as long as everything connects via TCP and has enough bandwidth for your needs.
Setup a linux server, with enough disk space for your media collection and whatever else you want to store there. Install gnumpd3 from
here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
Install a desktop linux distro on the machines in each room. Aim a web browser from any machine at the URL of the gnump3d server and viola! you have music from your collection on demand in any room!
Streaming radio style music is easy as well. Install icecast from here:http://www.icecast.org/
and aim the xmms player from here: http://www.xmms.org/ and you have streaming media! woohoo!
If you want to control a distribution system that plays the same songs things get more complicated, you'll need Apple computer's RTSP server and some client software to get everything sync'd throughout the house.
I use secure shell from my zaurus wireless pda and mpg123 and aumix to operate this from a pocket sized device. For everything else I just browse the music library with gnump3d's web interface. FWIW, I use SuSE linux. It came with all the above except for the Darwin Stream Server (or whatever it is that Apple calls it these days). I had to download and compile the icecast source, but what the heck, it wasn't to hard to do either.
HTH
This sig kills fascists.
Buy a box for each room that needs music, add any old (active) speakers (or a hifi amp), and you're good to go.
It comes with (Free & Open GPL
Each box comes with a remote, and they can all be controlled through a web GUI as well.
They come in both wired and wireless variants; The wired ones cost $200, The wireless ones are somewhat more expensive at $280.
The nice thing about them is that all the smarts are in the server - the squeezebox is basically just a network adapter, an MP3 decoder, and a soundcard (with a nice bright display and a remote IR receiver, of course). It will (knock on wood) last as long as I don't drop it on the floor, and I won't need to buy new devices next time the industry switches media again
Multiple squeezeboxes can be synchronized to play the same stream; You can't sync a software player and a squeezebox, though (no buffering control over the SW player, i guess).
No Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Slim Devices in any way; I just love their product
What is the difference between a real song and a simulated song?
Store all your music on a server somewhere. Set up multiple clients around the house connected to local stereo. Stream music to all of them in-synch or different songs to different players.
I have the older wired SPLIMP3 and I love it.
It is a lot easier than listening through the computer.
The SqueezeBox is wireless and has digital output on it. Plus the server is all open, so you can help contribute if you want!
www.slimdevices.com
-- I stole your sig!
This is probably too late a response to get noticed, but having just put a contract on a new house as well (as of today actually), my mind went to similar directions.
After quite a bit of googling, I've found that Sonos (http://www.sonos.com) has a really nice setup. It's not Linux-friendly, but if you're a Windows household, or can have an old Windows box lying around, it'll be great for you.
The basic setup is as follows: You can have up to 32 base stations, which act as both input and output. Plug a base station into your PC and install the software, and voila, it will now interface with the remote. The base stations communicate with each other wirelessly, acting as repeaters, or a wireless mesh, if you prefer.
You can have multiple sources (with multiple base stations, that is), but I don't know whether or not it is available to the other base stations if it isn't coming through the PC (and through their software), so you'll likely want to check into that.
All in all tho, while it is a little pricy, does involve zero wiring (except power, and ethernet if you don't have wireless), and the cost of putting together a 5-6 room thing with 4 remotes is still cheaper to put together a decent quality multi-zone whole house audio system.
-9mm-
Instead of trying to use 802.11g and multiple computers, why not just buy your own FM radio station and put a radio in each room?
0xfeedface
If you could afford it, it'd be best to run big diameter EMT from your hub location to your satellite locations. It's much easier to fish through, and even if it gets hard to fish a single new line through you can always empty and re-pull everything at once if you have to.
In an ideal world the house would have been planned for this to begin with and a wiring plenum would have run been established between all the floors (a riser plenum) and there would be a cross-shaped plenum in each and every room, as well as a plenum connecting all the rooms. With a few access panels here and there, you can go from any room to any room without a lot of painful, finished-wall fishing.
There's a commercial building accross the street that has a 3" raised floor encompassing every square foot of every floor of the building. Now that's what I call planning ahead.
Clearly digital is digital when you're looking at the data and hence the sound quality will be identical regardless of wether you use a different network link for delivery. I think the questionable aspect is the continuity of the delivery those 1's and 0's. Anybody who frequently uses wireless knows that there can be lag problems due to RF interference or heavy traffic on the wireless network segment. Dropped and late packets causing pauses for rebuffering aren't going to sound great with high fidelity speakers, especially when turned up loud. Also, anybody who's used XP Zero config knows that it can be a fantastic source of frustration, and Windows would have to be the platform if iTunes is to be used on a PIII. XP Zero Config is easily enough bypassed if you dont' use XP or if you use the vendor-supplied management software, but I don't know for sure that those options would be any better. I say that if you're building a house, definitely use a switched ethernet network. If you're buying a house, definitely consider any possible way to install ethernet. The worst-case solution would be wireless, and in that case you might consider ad-hoc for your audio units since it relieves strain on your access points.
Yeah, I think "GOLD PLATED CONNECTORS!!" on optical audio cables is all I have to say about Monster Cable. [shudder]
With the first link, the chain is forged.
There are definitely different grades of copper....that is, there are different amounts of impurities that they mix in. However, when it comes to hooking up speakers, it just doesn't make a huge difference.
Where cables DO make a difference is when you're hooking up line-level signals. i.e. the analog output of a CD player to your amp. The shielding of the cables is what makes the difference. And if the signal is coming from a turntable or microphone, it's REALLY important since those signals are boosted in the amp so much more. Even still, you're not going to notice much of a difference between RCA cables you buy at WalMart vs Circuit City. When it comes to hooking up digital outputs (DVD) to your Dolby Digital amp, it doesn't make a difference at all as long as you have a coax cable (with RCA ends) meant for digital use. For this, just get the WalMart version.
The only time cables can make a difference is if they're gold plated which only really helps if EVERYTHING (plugs and jacks) are gold plated. Ask anyone who works in a recording studio and they say gold plating on everything can lower your total noise floor by 2db, which is significant for studios... probably wouldn't notice it in a house.
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I've tried everything to get the same sound in multiple rooms using wifi and I could never get it working.
I have a smallish 1bdr flat and I like to have the same music playing in my bedroom, kitchen and bathroom as I roam through the flat in the morning (my neighbors must love me). I tried to stream mp3 from a central server but the laptops would all have a different buffer and the sound was out of sync in all three locations.
My final solution was to use an FM transmitter. The upside is I can use cheap receivers in the kitchen and bathroom. The downside is poor sound quality in those locations (the bedroom is wired to the source).
There's more to cabling than oxygen-free copper, pair twisting, and stranding/braiding. Most people seem to ignore insulation and installation ratings.
If cable is installed inside a wall without conduit, it must be rated for in-wall use. Most lamp cord and extension cords are not, as well as your typical clear-jacket lamp-cord-style speaker cable. If installed in a plenum (air-handling space, typically the space above a false ceiling in your office building), then the insulation must be plenum rated. This means that in the event of a fire, the insulation a) does not support combustion, and b) meets standards for emissions in the event of a fire. If your cabling does not meet the standards for the particular installation, then you'll have to run it in conduit.
In addition, most of your "Home Depot" cord and most audio cables are not rated for permanent installation. Usually, cable designed for permanent installation has individually insulated conductors and a durable outer jacket. (Rule of thumb: interconnects between equipment are considered temporary. If the wire runs thru a wall or is somehow fastened to a surface, then it's considered permanent.)
Don't run your cables under a rug or carpet. This is dangerous: the slight bump in the carpet can be a tripping hazard, the carpet does NOT protect and in fact increases the wear on the cable, heat dissipation is hampered by the carpet, and the cable cannot be visually inspected for damage.
Oh, and another thing about twisting pairs -- for speakers, twisting your pairs won't necessarily improve RF rejection (considering the amplitude of the signal), but will help prevent your speaker signals from inductively coupling to your other signal lines. That is, with parallel non-twisted cable, your speaker lines are not a magnet for interference, but rather are a source for it.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You misspelled "iPod."
Many of us already have some kind of a system to play music in digital form. iPods, Rios, hell even PCs with some kind of media player on them or... the venerable CD player. A while back I sat thinking about the best way to be able to listen to music throughout the house without needing to either:
1. Run speaker wires to every room
2. Cart the music playing system (I use a PC with XMMS on Linux) around the house
3. Run network cables to each room I wanted to listen to music in
4. Or just have a device in every room
All of these seemed cost/time prohibitive. Then I got to thinking... What do I have in every room of the house that I could use to get music into the room without a lot of effort? It dawned on me: heating/cooling ducts. (If you have steam heat or baseboard heat, then my post doesn't apply to you) What I wound up doing was moving my music playing PC from the living room down to my basement (yeah mine. not my parent's) and putting a speaker transducer in the heater that connects to the main ducts. Then I set the volume high enough the the vibrations travel through the ducts to every room at a suitable volume.
Pros:
1. Wireless!!!
2. Plays music!!!
3. Answers silly Ask Slashdot question!!!
Cons:
1. Tinny sound at best
2. Too loud when you are closer to the first floor
3. Can't control what your listening to (I play in random+repeat mode)
I'm pretty sure that the majority of you have ductwork in your house and could take advantage of this innovative approach to whole house wireless music distribution. Let me know what you think!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
feeds troll...
Speaker wire is nothing more than fancy AC power cables, and with a good reason- analog audio is represented electrically as AC current. Nothing special, just simple AC. It's voltage and frequency vary considerably (voltage = volume, frequency = pitch), but it's just AC nonetheless. The only reason why it doesn't look like it is because most of the time there's a fancy connector on the end of it... or other times, just bare wire.
The only reason why your dryer has thicker cable than your TV is due to the fact that the dryer pulls much more current than the TV, and to avoid literally melting your cables and starting a nice electrical fire the conductive material is thicker to carry the increased current. The same is true for speaker cables- the cable used on big, multi-kW PA systems is much bigger than the 1 W headphones you've got.
As long as you don't do silly things like running audio parallel to power cables (tends to induce a 60 Hz hum into your audio) and make sure you cross all power cables @ 90 degree (or pi/2 radian) angles, you will get great performance with either Home Depot extension cords or Monster Cable speaker cable, because they are the exact same thing. Keyboard magazine ran an article a few years back on cable comparisons. The listening test, done with at least 10-15 people, showed no superior performer. The only way they could rank them is in how well they lasted (one of their tests: slam the cable in a pickup truck bed door 10 times and see if it still works).
There is differences between different kinds of cable, but the differences are for signal types. Analog audio is AC, so AC cables work just *great*. For example, twisted pair ethernet uses a differential signal to avoid interference problems, more details can be found here. Check up on your stuff next time before trolling so hard.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
I have installed a home network in our home (2700 square foot, 7 rooms). Here's the bottom line- wireless is unreliable and slow, you'll need plenty of repeaters to make it semi reliable. After trying different base stations, repeaters and cards I gave up and pulled cable. It was a hassle but I now have an extremely reliable gigabit LAN. Audio is streamed from a rackmount system in the garage to Audiotrons in the various rooms and video is streamed to a PC with an xcard in the living room. The video streaming was a semi-custom solution, I can play ripped DVD's in full quality mpreg2 over the network. Watching a DVD involves a menu click using the xcard remote control, the DVD starts playing almost instantaneously.
Wireless is great for certain applications, but if you own your home I would go with a gigabit copper LAN. It's cheap and it works even when your neighbor is microwaving a burrito.
Solder DOES increase conductivity and you can solder wire to a speaker but you have to be VERY careful. I never solder wire to a speaker for two reasons....
1. Speakers can blow. If you need to swap a speaker out, using quick connects works a lot better. I use to run a sound company and sometimes we'd have to swap speakers out in the middle of a gig.
2. Soldering irons are hot! The voice coil of a speaker can easily be damaged (or it's life-time shortened) due to the heat. Especially high frequency drivers...never solder dome tweeters!
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I did the electrical wiring in the house. If you do it yourself or if you hire it done, believe me when I tell you that you have to put in the extra time to do a neat, clean job. Runs should have square corners. Multiple runs should follow the same path(s) back to the panel. This allows you to route your voice/data/TV cables and conduit away from runs of romex or at the very least cross them once on the way to the closet. Yes you have to staple the wires up every 4'. Plan ahead and use 3m Stack-It clips. Yes you have to have a dedicated circuit for your entertainment center and primary computer installation(s). All this means you'll spend extra in wire but it won't cost you that much more (under $50, easy. 1000' of 12/2 is $127 @ Lowes). The contractors will hate you for it but 1) some of it is code, like the part about stapling up wire runs), and 2) they work for you. Tell them to deal with it. I was in a friend's basement early last Fall. The house he lived in was built new a year or two earlier. The 1st floor trusses were an absolute cluster-fuck of wiring. You could trace a wire through that mess if you life depended on it. It seriously looked like one of those pictures I know you've reached from some buddy that shows a telephone pole in some 3rd-world country that has a couple thousand various strands of wire pulled off of it, running every which way. A cluster fuck. There was no way he could route his voice and data runs through that mess without succumbing to the interference. Clean, neat, professional (better than the average professional!) runs are a must. Now, back on topic.
I ran Carlon (Lamson Home Products) 3/4" ENT (Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing) flex tube from most boxes back to the accessible side of the basement. It's too expensive to buy well over 1500' of conduit for each and every cable drop. In all honesty you don't have to run conduit to drops that will probably never updated wiring. The drop in your kitchen wall for the family telephone is a good example. Ideally you would run it everywhere but realistically it's not worth the expense. In some cases actually running PVC water lines is cheaper (not to get into a discussion about plenums, PVC, fire, and toxic fumes).
I also used Carlon's low-voltage gang boxes for all the cable drops. They have a knockout in the top and bottom to allow to quick and easy connections to the flex tube with a Carlon Terminal Adapter and an appropriately sized knockout nut (not supplied).
I highly recommend not going with flexible conduit that's any smaller than 3/4" if you expect to pull more than 3 wires (Cat5, RG6, whatever). I pulled 3 x Cat5 and 2 x RG6 lines through 3/4" flex tube but it was a tight fit. 6 would have been very tight. 7 wouldn't have fit. Ideally you would run 1" to all major drops with more than 5 wires, 3/4" to all drops with 3 or 4 wires, and I suppose 1/2" to anything with fewer wires (but only if you got an extremely good deal on it). It's worth noting that the Carlon gang-boxes do not have a 1/2" knockout. The boxes come pre-cut to 3/4".
A good fish tape and some Gardner Bender Wire-Aide(tm) pulling lube is an absolute must (I think that's what I'm using currently). Don't even think about attempting this without both of those items. Depe
I had a similar project. I built a media server from scrounged parts (533 Celeron mb, scrounged ps, built my own aluminum chassis and hard drive shock mount, etc.) Server software is Debian Sarge, including Glirnath and gnump3d. All the CDs were ripped onto their own partition on the hard drive (Lame-based encoder) The server is hooked up to the A/V unit and the TV in the living room. Using the web-based interface in Glirnath, I can play music on the main stereo. Using gnump3d I can play music at a local console (desktop or laptop). Since both software packages use a web interface, the "client" machine can be any machine with a browser.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
An A/B/X test is a type of blind test used to impartialy show a statistical preference for A, B or Undetermined. The X sample is A or B (random) and is just used to determine the number of surveyed test subjects that could/couldn't tell the difference between A and B.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"