Re: help please! whole house audio system

["wkearney99" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> holy cats... $2200 just for the box... I'm just an old farm boy.. I
> aint got that kinda money.. any less expensive routes for me to go?
> jeez... the wife just wants to be able to hear christmas music in the
> rooms and I want to be able to control the volume in each room.  More
> ideas?

Simple impedance matching volume controls would work.  They only give you
volume control, obviously and only a single source.

If you want to send IR commands from remotes back to the source equipment
you can look at things like Russound's A-Bus kits.  Either as a single
source distributed to 4 zones or 4 source to 4 zones.  Additional kits can
be added for more output zones (still single or 4 sources).

On average we use 4 sources.  Two mp3 streams from a PC, an FM tuner and
DirecTV Tivo.  The other two sources are for the DVD player and 5 disc CD
changer.  We have yet to use the DVD signal as we tend to only watch them in
the home theatre.  The disc changer only gets used when there are discs that
haven't yet been ripped to mp3 files (or wma lossless).

Being able to control simple start/stop and next/previous from a wall keypad
is a lot more convenient than having to dig up a remote and point it at the
keypad.  This is why we went with the CAV6.6.

Yes, it would be nice if it were less expensive.  But when you factor in 6
output amplifiers along with integration with keypads and 6 audio AND video
source switching it's not an unreasonable expense.  I looked seriously at
alternatives and cobbling up solutions with individual pieces of equipment
wasn't significantly less expensive.  That and it's CERTAINLY a lot more of
a pain in the ass to use/maintain, a factor to consider if you're talking
about the WAF (Wife Acceptace Factor).

-Bill Kearney