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Comment by sponaugle | Hacker News Reader

I am just finishing up building a new house, and so many people suggested the same thing (use sonos). Since it was new construction I put in 38 dedicated room speakers all wired to a central distribution system with good old speaker wire. I also ran extra Cat6A to each room for a control pad in the case I want to do system that needs that..and for starting out I'm using an AMP and dist controller from HTD. As Zeroth mentioned above this gives me a great deal of potential future redesigns as things change. Of course I also ran wire and fiber to every room for APs as the future will likely have more LOS wifi in it.

I really like some of the features of Sonos, but when doing 38 speakers and 20+ zones the cost is pretty high.

(Build thread here for reference: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=409988)

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I am curious to know what it’s the point to have this kind of system?

I can imagine you would want to play the same music through the house when you have a big party. Other than that I don’t see much of need. You can simply have a sound system in each room so each family member can its own music , or carry a movable device with you.

If you've designed the wiring correctly this can be done at the central junction, isolating the that room (or rooms). then, when you setup that sound system in the room you already have the speakers built in. just plug into the port on the wall :D I've seen this kind of setup several times, though it was the early 2000's, before the massive proliferation of wifi audio.

note: one of the reasons i saw a lot of this was the company i worked for acquired a structured wiring company (system in a box) that did lots of home/office AV work

For the wiring path, I did exactly that. In each room the speakers in the wall/ceiling route first to a junction box in the wall, then from there to a central location. That allows central control, or if needed local to room control and use.

The only additional cost was the slight increase in wire length due to the minor path diversion.

I guess it depends on whether you really like music. I find it very nice to just open up the Sonos app and I can play whatever I want wherever I want- and can even play different things in different rooms.

Its not just a holiday thing, its a friday/saturday night thing, or a Saturday/Sunday day thing, or a work from home thing, if I want some instrumental stuff, and its also going outside.

I had a receiver in my old place in my living room, and we were gifted a sonos:1, and the sheer convenience of sonos made us not use our expensive home theater set up in lieu of the $199 bookshelf speaker- and it sounded pretty darn good as well. It integrates with my music library, Pandora, sonos, and a bunch of other stuff I don't use.

I now have Sonos amps that connect to speakers in the ceiling. I am not quite as F'ed as others, but those amps are $600 a piece to upgrade, and I have 6 in the house. I really enjoy it, and its better and cheaper than a receiver in each room, and sounds great. Another benefit to Sonos is that its hidden away- the speakers are in the walls, the amps run down to a central cabinet, and in a townhouse that is not small, but still every sq ft counts, this is a big win.

It may not be for you, but I really enjoy it. This was not a pleasant email to read- especially because I don't really want anything more out of the system, particularly the amps- they need to accept a stream and play it, that's it. I bet this has to do with alexa/google assistant/siri integration that is being forced down our throats in all new devices.

Indeed I thought a lot about that while working on the zoning. The HTD system by default can do 12 zones (with as many speakers as you want). I suspect it would be rare to have more than 2 or 3 different sources across all of those zones, but it would be common to only want a few specific rooms have sound playing.

The idea of a movable source device makes sense, and I suspect a very common use pattern will be playing something over airplay/airplay2 from a iphone. The zone splitting just makes it possible to have more granular control over where that sounds is going.

I debated a lot about rather to install speakers at all, but I do want to be able to have some housewide paging/notification, and I would rather have each room have stereo speakers in the ceiling ( with a corresponding sub for some locations) then rely on a desk or table held speaker.

Also, the cost of doing in wall is pretty cheap now if you are building new.

Keep in mind it is possible in 3 years I figure out I did it all wrong, but that is the fun of home building. ;)

My home is very much smaller, but I have synchronised playback throughout (through the Apple ecosystem). Living in a condominium, I can listen to my music, audiobook, or podcast everywhere without having to play anything loud anywhere.

Congratulations on finishing your new home. And judging by the timestamps on your first forum post pretty much on/ahead of schedule!

To those who might gloss over the link to the build thread - it’s not to be missed. I’m only part of the way through but will read more after the kids are in bed.

Calling it a “house” doesn’t seen quite sufficient. This is a detailed look at the whole process from plans to excavation to build-out of a veritable fortress.

Here’s just a taste;

> Due to the design of his house, he had to install bedrock pillars. There are 55 pillars in total, and each pillar is a bit over 3 feet in diameter and goes into the ground a bit over 50 feet.

Later on, talking about low voltage design for Cat6 and fiber drops;

> I expect to have a couple of hundred drops in total including for things like cameras, sensors, and the like. I expect there is be somewhere around 10km of wire to pull give or take a few km.

EDIT: Great drone footage of it all as it goes up too. How do you like the DJI Mavic? I was thinking of getting the Mini.

Ha.. Thanks Zaroth. Funny enough it actually ended up being about 21 miles of cable and fiber.

I suspect we are about 8 weeks away from completion.. and I need to update that thread as I am a month behind!

So in this case do you need 1 receiver for every service you want to stream simultaneously? I assume your controller can do on-the-fly zone designations, but how do you control it all from other locations (or is that what you meant about control panels)

Yea, the HTD 'receiver' is seperate from the amps, and it can route one of I think 12 sources to any of the channels (and any mix of them).

For control, there are two options - You can use the app/web page/iphone/table over wireless, and/or you can also use their wall control pads that use a single Cat5 drop back to the central location. For every speaker pair in the house I ran a Cat6A to a wall box in a good place to mount that control pad. That means in every room you have a control pad for that room, but also any control pad can put any source in any zone.

I'm curious to see what I use more.. I suspect I'll end up using the app control more than anything else.. but we will see.

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