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Poor Man's Whole House Audio?
robtheauditor asks: "I would love to have my music in all the various rooms of our house. I can't afford the thousands for a turnkey system. What are the possibilities for a poor man's whole house audio system? For example, would it be possible to take my PC external audio connector and feed it to a bunch of powered speakers in different rooms? Could I just bring a bunch of 3.5mm plugs wired together in parallel, or would that not work? I was thinking that even if the signal is weak because it is split to 6 different speaker pairs, because the speakers are powered it wouldn't matter. Or will I risk burning out my sound card?"
Could I just bring a bunch of 3.5mm plugs wired together in parallel, or would that not work? I was thinking that even if the signal is weak because it is split to 6 different speaker pairs, because the speakers are powered it wouldn't matter. Or will I risk burning out my sound card?
Doesn't matter if the speakers are powered...by the time you split the signal six ways it'll be so attenuated that amplifying it at the destination will also amplify the problems, including distortion and noise in the line (especially if your speaker wires are unshielded). If you want to supply six pairs of speakers, you'll need a very strong starting signal..and your soundcard by itself is probably not up to the challenge. You'll have to preamp the signal before you split it. Shielded speaker wires wouldood idea as well. be a g
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Sorry, no fp joke here.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Use some light switches, so that when you enter a room all you have to do is flip the switch, and speakers come on. You could even get some of those switches where only one can be on at a time.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
The Squeezeboxes are about $200 each for the wired model 2, which is identical to the snazzier model 3 except for the appearance. $250 for the wireless version. (add $50 for Model 3s). Their hardware is extremely good, with top-quality DACs and very low-jitter digital outs. They'll outperform CD players that are much more expensive.
You'll need a computer to run the music server software. You can then easily sync up multiple rooms... and they all come with quite lovely displays and very useful remotes. This would be one of the cheaper ways to do this, and it has a nice side effect of being very, very high-quality.
But you still need amplification and speakers in every room, and that's going to add a buttload to the cost. You're essentially trying to buy six stereo systems on the cheap. I'd suggest repeated trips to pawn shops and Goodwill stores to get the sound gear... and then add your distributed music system from there.
The Squeezeboxes would make a really excellent backbone, but getting the signal to a room won't matter if you have nothing to play it back with.
Take a trip to your local Radio Shack and look for something called a speaker switch box. It would look like a small brick with a knob on the front with the letters "A", "B", etc. on it, and plugs on the back for input/output signals. This would have the net effect of unplugging thhe unused speakers from your soundcard without the need for plugging/unplugging the cables yourself, sparing you the signal degradation.
If you're at all handy with a soldering iron, you could probably make your own speaker switch box with $5 or $10 worth of parts.
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What are the possibilities for a poor man's whole house audio system?
That would be a walkman and a pair of headphones.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That approach has worked great for me, driving a set of three powered speaker pairs. Radio Shack even sells a one-in/three-out adapter plug; I use that to split the signal three ways, coming right off the soundcard speaker jack. Then I run 30-50 feet of shielded audio cable (bought in bulk and then connectorized; an easy soldering job) to each of the three powered speaker sets. Sound quality is fine.
I'm guessing that a six-way split would work just as well as my three-way split does.
http://www.radioshack.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId =2032057&kw=40-1462&kw=40-1462
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A friend of mine was considering using an FM Modulator from his PC to broadcast the computer's audio across into another room for his speaker system.. In theory you could do this buying 1 FM Modulator and some basic clock/radio's.. Not super high-tech, not super-powerful, but gives you sound in every room ? Problem would be finding an FM modulator running off AC power -- most are designed for Car's to go from CD-players or mp3 players to car audio... Hell, I might try this myself.. being that I spend most my time in my basement / workshop, I don't get a strong signal for any station without the single cable I have running down from my Antenna on the roof... I could easily set this up and broadcast music into my Exercise room, or my Work room.. as well as my home theater system's reciever... Probably would get a better singal then a 6-spliced wire... but not better then a straight connection, or a two-splice connection... but im not an electrician, I just play with sound systems a lot :-)
Seriously. Spend your money on getting a really good FM transmitter. Then any radio you can buy becomes a speaker for the system. No wires to run, no hassles.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Put some speakers all over your house, run them to an amp, run a cable from the amp to your PC. What's the problem?
rooooar
Run a box that is streaming the music via an 802.11g wifi router over your local lan, setup as many terminals you need for the appropriate # of speakers, oh and make sure that if you use an external router, make sure it runs on linux. then you could stream local mp3s or stream streams ... or sumthin like that
This has been a msg from your Linux User Service Example RepresentativeS. LLUSERS for short.
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Alright, the WAY TO GO for whole house audio is 25V systems. You just need a 25V audio amplifier (figure like 2W per speaker) and these special speakers which have transformers built into them. You could also go with 70V audio but its more expensive (although easier to find). Don't try to get this stuff new though; you'll pay way to much. Instead, go to business auctions (restaurant auctions are a good place for this) and going out of business sales. You'll get much better deals. Strangely, this stuff is somewhat hard to find on the internet.
Just so you know, the benefit of 25V (and 70V) audio over standard direct to speaker connections or 3.3V/5V/8V audio signals is less attenuation. 25V and 70V systems can transmit audio signals without degradation over very long distances, like what you would need to wire a whole house or building. The more usual types of audio transmission can only go a few feet.
The other benefit (perhaps more important) is that you can have as many speakers as you want on the same wires in parallel (as long as your amplifier can handle it). Under ordinary wiring schemes, you can only have one device per output channel. If you split it, either the signal will degrade or the amplifier will overload.
The only problem with this scheme is that you need completely separate amplifiers and wires for each channel (left and right) if you want stereo output instead of mono. This precludes the usual combining of grounds that most people use.
If you want to be able to control the volume of each speaker independently just toss a potentiometer between one wire and the transformer on the speaker. Like a 50 Ohm ought to be fine.
Now, just so every knows, this scheme is only cheap if you find the equipment used. Brand new, this stuff is quite expensive. BUT, this stuff is pretty easy to find used if you look for it.
If you have no patience, you could try any number of other schemes. I think one of my favorites (I have a friend how actually did this) is to buy a bunch of very crappy computers (think Pentium 200), take them out of the cases and embed them in the walls (he had fans to push the heat into his airducts). Then he attached them via ethernet and multicasted his audio signal to all his crappy machines. All ten of them (he has a HUGE house). The computers are hooked up to vintage stereos which he uses as amplifiers for each room. He controls all this with his laptop and SSH. He usually leaves the stereos on and turned up and turns the sound to each room on and off by sshing into the approriate machine. He recently told me that he's thinking of changing his setup to using one of those network audio protocols, (nas, I think) so that he can have different stuff playing in each room. He also said he was thinking of adding IrDA transcievers to his crap machines so that he can control them with his Palm.
Get a big boombox, and CRANK IT UP!
Tada, whole house audio. Your neighbors will love you because you're installing systems for them, too, and for free!
Buy 6 cheapass stereo systems, and burn 6 cds? :)
DYWYPI?
It doesn't have to be difficult.
The sound card is almost always designed to drive headphones with its "line-level" output. It is, therefore, low-impedance - typically in the several-hundred Ohm range.
Powered speakers are high-impedance. 47K ohms is common.
This all conspires to mean that you can drive lots of pairs of cheap self-amplified computer speakers with a single cheap computer sound card, and that it such a topology is even within the design parameters of the gear in question.
But don't just take my word for it: We'll make some assumptions and pound out a silly example!
Let's assume we want to drive 16 (!) amplified speaker pairs of 47K ohms each.
This gives us a load of about 2.8K, which is nowhere near as demanding as the set of headphones that the sound card device is intended to drive. It is also substantially higher than the output impedance of the sound card, and is therefore Just Fine(tm) by the defacto standard methods of interfacing consumer line-level audio devices.
Sure, it'll be attenuated somewhat compared to driving one set of speakers. It will be measurable. It will be predictable. Is it such a big deal to turn up the volume in compensation? The frequency response will be fine, so what's the big deal?
This is just line-level audio, folks. It's supposed to be easy, and in this case, it is particularly so.
Kid-proof tablet..
Google for Boosteroo. It's a one stereo in, three stereo out preamp/headphone amp that you could stick between your soundcard and your speakers.
I thought there was a Slashdot article about hacking it a while back but I'm not finding it.
The reason to need to know how to take it apart is because it runs on a battery or two and you might want to hook up an AC adapter.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Slim devices contributes to a GPL'd Server that is typically used to stream to their SqueezeBox player hardware. But, get this, there are software versions of the Squeeze box, namely 'soft squeeze' that emulate nearly perfectly the hardware features, and in some cases, is more useful. If nothing else, WinAMP can be used as a client as well, and it's playlist can be controlled via Slim Server (though some features are lost).
Here's some features of Slim Server that make this worth considering for your whole-house idea:
A. Any cheap PC with a JVM can be a client player
B. The server can keep multiple players in-sync
C. All clients can be controlled centrally from the server's web-interface
D. The server can proxy web-casts/streams to your players
E. The server allows you to bit-peel/transcode audio for a given client (ideal if you wanted to stream your audio to your office/hotel/etc)
f. Fairly Robust indexing/browsing.
G. iTunes integration
Check it out at:
Slim Server Download, all platforms
Soft Squeeze @ Source Forge
if you want to do it on the cheap, you're obviously not going to be budgeting a decent set of speakers for each room, so what's the point of pumping a crappy audio signal across your house to worse speakers? I'm not saying a whole house audio project is a bad idea, or that cutting corners is a bad idea, but there comes a point where you have to realize that some things are expensive for a reason. You're not using proprietary hardware or software to do this, it's all generic off-the-shelf hardware and software. If the market hasn't made it cheap enough for you to be able to put this together on your budget, start saving, and do it right the first time when you've got the bankroll big enough.
Get an old, used 4:1 amp on the cheap with a mono output option. Put a speaker in every room. Assuming you have smaller speakers than the manufacturer was expecting to drive, use two speakers per line, for 8 total.
I wouldn't worry about stereo. When you have music coming from every room, stereo separation gets muddied. Alltogether, the audio is a bit cleaner in mono, if you've got 5 or 6 mono sources from around the house coming at you.
Another way to do it, if you really want to be cheap, is broadcast. Get a low-powered radio transmitter, pick an unused station, and blast it. Tune the radios in your house, and you're done.
The ______ Agenda
I'd look for a second- or third-hand 8-bus mixing console. The console would feed four stereo amps (from garage sales, thrift stores, whatever), and the amps would be hooked to four sets of stereo speakers.
If you look carefully, you can find stereo receivers from the 80s that have two sets of stereo speaker outputs, so you could have eight sets of stereo speakers.
The console would also be useful because you could have a number of different inputs, and pipe them to different areas of the house. So maybe the living room and basement are getting Skinny Puppy, and the kitchen and garage are getting military scanner traffic from a streaming audio server.
Everything but the console would be super-cheap. I have a (dual stereo) receiver, four halfway decent speakers, and two crappy speakers that I got from the "free stuff pile" at my old apartment building, for example. I would imagine a 70s or 80s 8-bus console could be had relatively cheaply too, as long as you don't look for a pro studio model in mint condition. Cheaper than the products other people are linking to, at least.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I'm out of my league when slashdotters start suggesting $200 pieces of gear, but I am an enthusiastic cheap hardware hacker and have some suggestions based on stuff I've tried. Please don't comment saying these approaches are ghetto. I know they are ghetto. That doesn't mean they won't have great results for cheap.
:)
:) Rat Shack and others sell 50 foot cables with headphone jacks on both ends. These are nice if you are terminating in an old set of computer-style self powered speakers. I've run three of them in series with no noticeable noise. If you are really hard up, the dollar store sells 100 foot phone cables. Don't bother trying to solder the fabric woven wires in them, use old phone sockets for breakout boxes. For line level signals this works well enough up to a few hundred feet.
It sounds like you want a system originating from just one source- since you were willing to spit the headphone hack signal so many times. For starters, maybe poke around for a device called a 'video distribution amplifier'. You can buy one for something like $20-$50 bucks in the US that will split one set of signals five or six ways. If you just want to split audio right now, ignore the video. Later, you can use the video to send an (admittedly low quality) image of the computer screen to TVs and video monitors around the house if your video card supports this or if your scrounge up a VGA to composite adapter.
Watch thrift stores for old receivers from the 70s. I've had great luck with old Panasonic and Technics receivers- they're surprisingly high quality. You can use these receivers two ways- to distribute and/or to receive audio in each room. To distribute, wire the audio signal from your computer into the AUX or TAPE PLAY inputs. The outputs labeled TAPE REC (there might be two sets of these hopefully) can go to another room to input into gear there. My experience has been that you can safely split each of these TAPE PLAY outputs once without noticeable degradation- so you can go to as many as four sets of amplified speakers, or four more amplifiers, or four car stereos from here.
Since you're hacking, you can also use the headphone jack on your receiver as another output- preferably to amplified speakers which are designed for this sort of signal. Although, be warned, on some equipment the presence of a headphone plug automatically turns off the local speakers if you were planning to use them. By the way, some (maybe 5% of what I've seen) 70's gear prefers 16 ohm speakers- 8 ohm speakers on them will sound a little funny, especially after you blow them out.
The receiver will also have some other inputs too, for your CD player, etc which then can be easily distributed to the whole house. Keep in mind that the old PHONO inputs prefer a different kind of signal from what your computer and CD player puts out.
As for cabling.. the best cable I've snagged while dumpster diving was some Ma Bell cabled with 16 or so sets of twisted pair, maybe 16 gauge or so. This works beautifully. For very long runs, poke around for the cable ordinarly used for composite video. There are some semi-cheap options on ebay like this, but for stereo you'll need two. People say not to use coax, but I've used it for audio when I've had some excess laying around, and it worked great for me. You can solder standard RCA plugs on the ends and seal. I like to use a bit of clay epoxy because it not only insulates but also protects.
Ok, now let's talk about how to actually play the audio you've very professionally sent to each room. I think the best bet in this kind of setup is the computer-style self powered speakers. They have volume and power switches on them, which is all the control you're going to have in that room anyway (unless you use VNC or some such like I do to control the media server). You can find old computer speakers in thrift stores pretty easily, but they always seem to be missing their power cables. This is where your lifetime spent not throwing away AC-DC power adapters
Omnifi DMS1 Digital Media Streamers can be had for as little as US$50, and come with both a wired and wireless NIC. Hook them up to some reasonably priced powered speakers, and you can have each room "wired" for less then US$ 75.
It's what I recently did for a friend, and he is VERY happy. So is his wife.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
What you need is an audio distribution amplifier (DA). They do exactly what the name suggests. This looks like it might do the trick, and it uses Cat-5 cable for the (analog) transmission, so you probably already have all the cable you'd need. Not exactly cheap, but they're certainly cheaper than pro-level DAs. Of course, you may want to go the squeezebox/digital route like many others are suggesting.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Got 70v sound system here in the house, running an old Sansui reciever someone was tossing out. I've seen really cheap systems using a car CD player!
Step up the output of each channel with a 70v XFMR, and run your lines. Run 'em thru a potentiometer(volume control, read up on linear v. audio pots), and then step them down with one XFMR per channel per room. XFMR taps to speakers. figure about $20 per to step up a channel, $20-50 for volume control, $5 per channel per room to step it down.
You will still get what you pay for with amp & speakers!
that's why he's talking about sheilded wire. but yeah, the loss over long runs will be way to big to have any quality or amplitude left over at the speaker end, even if you do crank the knob
A GOOD transmission antenna will run you another $90 or so. I haven't gotten mine yet, so I can only make it across my house in mono.
Still, it's more elegant than my 100-ft RCA-cable run, and has better reception quality AND range than my crappy X10 "mp3anywhere" 2.5gHZ transmitter.
-Clio
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Speakers, whether powered or not, have an impedance that must be watched if you're going to hook up more than two to each channel.
Put two 8 ohm speakers in series you get 16 ohms of impedance. This won't fry your sound card but the volume in the speakers will be lower.
Put two 8 ohm speakers in parallel and your impedance becomes 4 ohms. Volume stays the same but you risk burning your soundcard.
Put 6 speakers in parallel and you start a fire.
The best thing to do is put 4 speakers in series/parallel. Split the channel into two lines and put two speakers in series on each line. This keeps the impedance at 8 ohms and gives you 4 speakers.
Of course, the suggestion below to just buy an FM transmitter is the best one yet. You can buy tiny FM radios to plug into powered speakers if you really want the powered speakers, or just use boom boxes instead.
The only problem is finding a cheap way to get to analog from the SPDIF. If you were planning on using traditional speakers powered by a receiver, just make sure the receiver can take an SPDIF input. Otherwise, you'll have to get creative—nobody actually makes a cheap SPDIF-->analog converter because there's not much demand. You may be able to find a minidisc player/recorder that can monitor its optical input on its analog line outputs. Look around on ebay :)
The benefits of this system are that you don't have to run cords, it is entirely digital (no quality loss), and, because of the nature of an SPDIF signal, the sound will still be exactly "in sync" throughout the house (one room's audio won't be a few seconds behind another or anything).
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You can build your own squeezebox-alike cheap as nuts. Its a hack, but its cool. Get an OpenWRT box with a USB output and hook up a USB sound card. Cost should come in under $120. You can also get a ATI Remote Wonder for RF remote control. You should only need one or two recievers for the whole house, and you can sometimes buy the reciever & the remotes seperately on ebay. For now I leave sync issues as DIY. More some day.
-Myren
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Soldering a longer antenna onto my tunecast 2 from Walmart made it cover most of my four bedroom house.
My radios are not cheap, though. You can get some very good tuners at thrift stores. Any digital tuner is good, though not expensive. Really cheap analog receivers are terrible and should be avoided. My wife's favorite little boom box, which she uses for CDs, does not work on FM at all anymore.
If you are really poor, you only have one room, so I'm not sure what the problem is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My only home Audio solution for the last 10 years has been a top-line Panasonic Gettoblaster (RX DT 75). Dual-Tape (fast dub), CD, Radio, Time/Timer (for *everything*, incl. timed radio recording, timed wake-up+playback or wake-up+record from stand-by, etc...).
And *everything* is remote controlled with a full-blow 40-button remote- my last main buying point.
On top of that all CD drawers, display covers and tape deck slots are power driven and remote controllable.
The audio quality is great and even beats (no pun intended) installed audio, since you can - and this is the whole point - move the thing where ever you want in (or out of) the house in under 60 seconds and set it up facing the space whereever you are, giving you clear, unmuddied stereo. The three-way speakers are of good quality and tuned for standing-low-in-a-little-box performance.
One of the greates things about this solution is that - beside the power cord - you have zero cabelage. The one I have does have full-blow cinch audio in,out and through connectivity though, so I can hook it to an amp whenever needed.
There is but one downside: The thing (see picture) is ugly as hell. It's even so ugly, it actually is cool again. Anyway, despite it's sheer size for a gettoblaster (you don't want to carry this around with you for longer than 5 minutes) it is notably unobstrusive as a movable home stereo solution. And for that even a cheap one.
When my current one tanks I'll get something simular with a iPod dock as it's core component. Apple has some nice third party gettoblaster-ipod extensions on their site - you might want to consider that todays equivalent of a luxury gettoblaster.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Do what real audio engineers do, run balanced signal lines. You can buy really good, pre-packaged "balun" transformers for $30 bucks/line or so, or you can by cheap isolation transformers and adaptors at RadioShack or such like, and build your own for cheap. With something like this; You should be able to run balanced audio for both the left and right channels on a cat-5 line, and build some boxes with cat-5 jacks, a cheap isolation transformers, and a stereo audio jack, and daisy chain as many speaker boxes together as you'd like. Hook the driver box to your computer, and hook an amplified speaker to each other one.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I see that answers are all over the map. You may want to be more specific in terms of budget, and what you will accept for audio.
In my case, I wanted a system that didn't require large cash outlay (i.e. no large multichannel amps). I wanted one that I could grow piecemeal and buy things a bit at a time on a shoestring budget, yet they would work as an integrated whole. But I wanted true stereo in each room, from real in-ceiling speakers (FM radios don't cut it).
The solution I settled on is A-Bus. A-Bus is a music-over-Cat5 technology with You wire a single Cat5 (much easier to fish through walls than speaker cables) from a hub near your music source to each room. The hub is less than $100. In each room, you put an amplified volume control (less than $50 - see e.g. http://www.basshome.com/product_8464_detailed.htm - you can also get one that can pass IR to your audio source) and wire from that to your speakers, which is usually a fairly short run.
Works well, sounds great, looks like a high-end system, and not too much cash outlay at any given time.
bp
One line output driving a bundle of line inputs: works, but not good (impedance problems, ground loops unless you use symmetrical inputs, cables and output)
One amplifier output driving a bundle of speakers: too many speakers kill the amplifier (impedance goes too low), lots of loss on long cables. Driving a 4 ohm speaker via a long, thin cable having 2 ohm per wire uses half of the power to heat the cable.
The standard technique for distributing audio to a bunch of speakers is to use 100 volts (I don't know about USA, I've read another comment about 25 volts, which seems to be the same trick on an idiot-proof voltage level). Nearly all super markets that I know use 100 V sound distribution for the background music and anouncements. The power amplifier drives the line with 100 volts at maximum output (usually using an output transformer), each speaker has a transformer that matches 100 volts to the power and impedance of the speaker. This sounds like a hifi enthusiasts nightmare, but it sounds pretty good when done right. There are several benefits: You can not kill a 100 V / 10 W speaker with a 100 V / 1000 W amplifier at full power, it will simply emit 10 W. (But a 100 V / 10 W amplifier will be killed by a 100 V / 1000 W speaker.) The high voltage makes wire resistance nearly irrelevant, you can wire 100 V sound as you would wire light bulbs. You can even use the same switches. Most speaker transformers have several inputs, allowing you to reduce the volume by switching to another input. There are also wall-mount potentiometers to adjust the volume, but they trade volume for heat. The main disadvantage is pretty obvious: You need one transformer per channel in or behind your amplifier, and one transformer per speaker. You can add the transformers to common hifi equipment, but there are also professional amplifiers with build-in transformers, usually rack mounted, and professional wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted speakers with transformers. At least the latter will kill your budget.
If your house does not have much metal inside the walls, i.e. if you can use one set of wireless speakers even through several walls, you could buy several identical sets, one set for each room. Set up all receivers (speakers) to "listen" to the same transmitter, connected to your PC. No cables (except for the speaker's power line), no impedance trouble, but depending on the quality of the sets, you may have some RF interferences (especially with a mobile phone nearby).
There are power line audio distribution systems (Devolo is very popular in Germany). You run a wire from your PC to a wall brick, that modulates your audio signal onto a HF carrier, and injects it into your power line. Other wall bricks in other rooms filter the HF carrier from your power line and demodulate the audio signal. Another wire runs from the brick to some amplified speakers. Like before, no cables, no impedance trouble. No RF interfaces, but the Develo bricks may kill your budget.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Look at the one at the bottom for hooking directly to your soundcard.
Or look at this one at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007ODOMA/102-2
IANABAE (I Am Not A Bose Audio Engineer), but I suggest getting one good set of speakers, find an a/c vent in a central location in the house, and mount them to the vent grill. Turn the volume up until you can hear your music well in every room, then equalize the volumes by opening/closing the vent in each room. Quick and cheap!
What's that? Quality?
Well, I'm not sure about you, but my a/c ducts are all tuned. They sound better than the speakers by themselves!
This sig rocks the casbah.
There are some people having success with using the Linksys NSLU2 and Unslung as an audio player.P layer/
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/SlugAsAudio
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001FSCZO/
All the worlds indeed a
Just do it the old fashioned way.
Go to a local second-hand stereo store. Buy a big huge heavy stereo with a Tape input (line level) and a big linear amp. Feed the PC into that.
Some old stereos have up to four "zones" of stereo speaker outputs. Buy a speaker switchbox or make one from a bunch of good quality switches. Be nice to your amp and don't switch things in and out when it's on... turn it all the way down or off and switch in the zones you want music in. (Takes a whole 5 seconds.)
Run speaker cables around the house and hook up good quality speakers whereever you want tunes. You can buy some nice stuff at that same second-hand store, probably -- or on eBay. Hunt around for old "audiophile" gear that's completely lost its monetary value (and looks old too, for that "retro" look), and you'll get great gear for next to nothing.
Don't buy fancy "monster" cable... just get a nice solid large gauge wire. Spend a weekend running cables through walls, under floors, etc.
Save some money and do it the way everyone did in the 70's! You'll be able to absolutely blow your house away with sound that sounds good for only a couple hundred bucks.
+++OK ATH
...you missed the "poor man's" part of the question.
The guy wants to buy some wire and speaker terminals, not a centrallized full-house entertainment system, which I'm sure Google returns hundreds of. He wants to know the best way of going about this without installing a prefissional sound system.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I couldn't remember the colors. :) I'm going to try that combination voltage mixing trick.
-p