Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd. - Support Forums and Community

Cead Mile Failte!

I have begun a project to build a new house, and approaching the point where the Basement will soon be sealed in.

I have being testing a number of IP based solutions for Audio distribution trough the house. However, I am not making the progress I would like; quick enough. And invite your comments and suggestions on what is the right option.

As a base I have a number of Servers, one of which is a Dell box with 2TB of SATA RAID 10 storage. This is currently home to many of my Movies and MP3 collection.

To distribute the Music I have tested Roku Sound bridges and some Squeezeboxes. This works pretty well, with independent selection of the MP3 to be played in each zone, streaming of internet radio streams, or connection to my own ICECAST stream for paging applications. Both systems have a good API that can be used to remotely control the devices (alas not in CQC Yet!)

However, I will not be deploying these in my new house due to 1 real problem. Audio Synchronisation - If I select to stream a raido station in 1 zone, and then my wife for example also streams the same station in another zone the chance that they will ever be in sync is very low; thus resulting in a noisy mess.

I need a minimum of 6 zones to start, and as the house is converted to a home will need to enable some additional zones. The options I believe that are available are:
1) Sonos
2) Russ sound CAV6.6.

The have tested the Sonos, and it does not have the same issues as the Sound Bridge/Squeezebox. Streaming stays in Sync for Internet streams. Also I do not need to run my own internal Stream Server (ICECAST) as the Zone Players have a Line In that can also be distributed for playback to the other zones (Max 32 Zones); which is great for paging, or announcements(Doorbell, Fire alarm, Dinner time!!)

The Sonos also has some Perl scripts that allow it to be controlled remotely via its UPnP interface; but again - not in CQC Yet!

The final option appears to be the Russ Sound system, but this I have no information on. Only that IT IS supported on CQC.

I would really appreciate your comments and of course questions.

regards
Damian

Welcome.

For multizone audio, i'd definitely recommend a hardware based solution like the Russound, or the Xantech MRC88, which is the Xantech competitor. There's a driver that's just been written for that, still in beta though.

In theory, you have a 3rd option, which is the Xantech ZPR68. That is a seperate pre-amp, and you'd need a seperate amp or amps for that. I use a collection of 2ch/4ch/6ch amps for that, which allows me to match the desired watts per channel to the zone. The MBR gets 75wpc, most other zones get 30wpc, i think outdoors is something like 50wpc but I can't remember.