Whole House Audio CHEAP!

[shill]

I wired it up with the mono jacks with the intention of combining the channels at the destination, but perhaps the signal strength is being affected by that..

I'll pick up some of the 3 connector jacks on the way home and give those a try.. all that soldering wasted! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[jruby]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rupp:
I would use somthing like this for wiring any new home. That way its done once and forever.

http://www.smarthome.com/8683.html

Could you use this whire with cat 5 equipment as everything I have is cat5 now cat6?
Thanks.


-Rupp<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

[X10atomy]

I am presently using AM/FM Receivers at various locations in my house. I control the receivers with appliance modules, and send audio to the receivers via a CD to FM interface ($20.00 at BestBuy).

Now I can have Audio anywhere, no wires, and the sound quality is pretty "darn" good.

[paugusto]

Is that one of those FM units to use a CD through your car radio? I never had much luck finding an empty spot on the FM band for it.

I've started to implement John's phone line method but took a different approach for wiring the jacks. My line 2 is already wired to all the RJ11 jacks - I used to have a second phone line in the house. I made some adapters using short pieces of 2 pair cable crimped into a modular plug on one end and soldered to an inline 1/8" stereo jack (Radio Shack #274-274 2/$2.99) on the other. I wired the line 2 pair to the jack jumping the left and right channels together. I can just plug the cord into an empty phone jack or use a dual adapter. I picked up a few of the dual adapters cheap at a local dollar store. I've got to pick up a few more cheap speaker sets and some modules to control them. So far I've only got one remote speaker set up and it sounds pretty good. Attached is a picture of my adapter cord.


Paul

[ChimpWare]

Paul,

That is pretty slick. I thought about doing that, but didn't think I could make it look very good. Very nice job.

ChimpWare
"Software so easy to use a monkey could do it..."

[dasher]

Just built a new house, so I'll put in my 2 cents worth [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] :

I ran 2 lines of RG6 coax and 2 cat5 leads to every room, with each of the cat5 leads on opposite corners of the rooms (one for telephone, other for computer hook up) to allow rearrangement of furniture without requiring long wires on the ground. So far it has worked pretty well. There are plenty of left over leads for projects such as whole house audio. (I also have 4 coax and 4 cat 5 going to the attic and crawl space for DSS, antenna, future expansion etc.)

One thing to remember with twisted pair wiring was that it works best with baluns at each end to cancel interference. This allows for great signal clarity and extremely high bandwidth even over unshielded lines. A device such as this http://www.magenta-research.com/brochures/audiocast.pdf can provide for excellent audio distribution, particularly if you have cat5 in star topology to all of your outlets. You can, in fact, transmit video over CAT5 using this technique (and baluns costing about $100/pair are available to do just this). If you are having trouble with audio, even without baluns, signal clarity may improve if a pair of leads is used for transmission of the (mono) audio signal and a separate pair is used for the ground lead.

I never thought of the FM transmitter idea - pretty neat...

[johnwpb]

Looks like I am still 30 votes behind, so no free home wireless internet [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img] (of course there is still a week left in the month) Thank you to all of you that did help put me into 2nd place. I am glad a couple of you were able to impplement this. I know the thing to do is prewire your house when it is built for audio, but thats not an option to those of us that werent there from when the house was built. This was a way to get audio over existing wiring without pulling wiring throught the house.

Thanks again to everyone that helped me out.

- "Home automation is no longer a thing of the future"

[Pete]

I wired my house for sound (alarm speech) about 12 years ago. At the time (still using) wired in an Excalibur alarm system. It's a nice alarm system in that it has not only zone loops but loops for every door/window in the house and it's got speech. It's kind of nice because the speech is pre-recorded and natural sounding not computer sounding. It also has status & hourly verbal chimes (don't use this feature anymore). The problem that I was having was that I have been feeding the Homeseer audio into the same speakers as the alarm...the audio from the alarm was very distorted with this setup. As I was writing this post decided to insert a vox switch on the alarm voice so whenever the alarm speaks it will shut off the Homeseer feed. This should fix the distotion problem. VOX switch is only about $10.

[shill]

I've been using this setup for a while, with 4 speakers around the house. Everything was running great, and suddenly the volume level has dropped so far at all my speakers that I can't hear a thing without turning them each up to full blast, at which point it's so distorted it's useless.

This is how we do our baby monitor, so if anyone has any ideas as to what happened or how I can fix it.. I experimented with unplugging everything but one pair of speakers, and it had the same problem. Connecting directly to the computer seems to work ok, though, but it's hard to tell relative volume levels.

Update: I connected the baby monitor's output to the wiring directly (instead of running it through the computer) and everything was back to normal. I recently upgraded to 1.6.11, and I also used the hs.SetVolume command (20, 20). It seems that those 2 things are at least coincidentally related, as it all happened around the same time.

So either it's software (mixer controls are all the way up, btw) or hardware (could the sound card be messed up? is there any potential damage from running such long cabling or too many speakers?).

[This message was edited by Steve Hill on Friday, 11 October 2002 at 10:08 PM.]

[pwhite8314]

Steve

Just an idea - I use a 5.1 Audigy card for sound, and use the subwoofer output (which is also a line out) for the audio that goes around the house. However, whenever I install a Windows update, the soundcard defaults to regular 2 channel output, which means that nothing is heard around the house unless things are turned up very loud, in which case it's just all hiss and distortion.

I'm sure you would have checked this, but just in case...

[electron]

Windows Update screws up my sb live every single time too, I lose 2 of my speakers and other settings are screwed up too, I thought I was the only one having this problem. Try (re)installing the latest manufacture drivers for your soundcard, and see if this fixes it.