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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?"
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.