Calling Patrido!! - I need your help!

pitstop

Hi Patrido

We are just talking with our (not cheap!) electrician on our new house build and would really appreciate your suggestions for wiring. I did trawl thru your posts today but admit to being overly thick!! :rolleyes: I have 2 flat screen TVs, 3 Macs with good size HDs, and 3 full iPods (might not be of use!!) - I would like to do the following:

Set up playlists at the main Mac Centre (easy!) and now what I find difficult:
How do I select which rooms I can play these in (don't want to wake the baby as an eg!)
How can I change volume remotely?

Also:
Watch different Sat TV in different rooms?
Set up for surround sound in sitting room!

And:
Watch and record CCTV from the garden, entrance and gates, baby's bedroom.

My electrician is happy to do the work (why not - he'll make a fortune!!) but he loses me after the first 2 questions!!

Your thoughts would be very useful including suggestions on equipment recommendations - I did try to do some research but every where I went (eg, askaboutmoney.com) recommended YOU!!

If you can describe in easy English that a thick female could understand - all the better - much appreciated!!

Pitsy!

patrido

pitstop wrote:

Hi Patrido

Hi There

Sorry for not replying sooner - I just haven't been online for the last while.

pitstop wrote:

We are just talking with our (not cheap!) electrician on our new house build and would really appreciate your suggestions for wiring. I did trawl thru your posts today but admit to being overly thick!! :rolleyes: I have 2 flat screen TVs, 3 Macs with good size HDs, and 3 full iPods (might not be of use!!) - I would like to do the following:

pitstop wrote:

Set up playlists at the main Mac Centre (easy!) and now what I find difficult:
How do I select which rooms I can play these in (don't want to wake the baby as an eg!)
How can I change volume remotely?

Multi room audio is a huge area, and it really depends on your budget.

The simplest solution is to run speaker cable to additional rooms, and use a speaker switcher with volume controls in the remote rooms. You have no control over playlists, etc - just on/off and volume.

At the top end there are lots of dedicated multi room products (opus, russound, sonos, roku soundbridge, squeezebox) and some will integrate with itunes. I have also seen wall mounted modules, into which you can dock your ipod. you can then listen to and control your ipod throughout your multi room audio system.

Apple have their own frontrow software product, which seems to be similar to microsoft's media center. I don't know a lot about it, but it seems you can use a mac mini connected to your tv, to play media. I would imagine that you can also connect other devices (maybe even the ipod with a network connector).

There are linux and microsoft based solutions also, but there's little point crossing oses unnecessarily.

If you give me more specifics about what you'd like to achieve (what you'd like to play where, and what you might buy), I can give you more specific advice.

In terms of wiring, some systems (like opus) can involve proprietary cabling, but for most purposes you can run cat5e or cat 6 network cable to each place you might have a music device or a tv, now or in the future. Wire this back to a patch panel and a network switch. This gives you a flexible network (which you can also use for your home computing and internet access).

Most multi room audio systems will run wirelessly, but wires will always be faster, more reliable and more secure, so put lots of them in now. Wires are cheap compared with what you'll connect them to! As you may not rewire for decades, try to imagine how "connected" your home might be in 10 years time and wire accordingly.

pitstop wrote:

Also:
Watch different Sat TV in different rooms?

I presume by satellite you mean sky and not cable (ntl/chorus)??

To watch sat tv in any room...
- Pick a place that can act as a central distribution point (this might be an office, or just the attic - but it will need power sockets). Ideally it should be the same place as the network switch I mentioned earlier.
- Run CT100 (which is a good quality version of the brown coaxial cable that goes into the back of your tv) to each room / tv point. Make sure there are at least 2 cables going to the room that will have the satellite box.
- Run CT100 from the main aerial (if you have one), and from any CCTV locations to your distribution point.

You can put in a (2 way/4 way/8 way/etc) distribution amplifier at the distribution point, which will allow you to watch tv in any room. however, you would have to go back to the living room to change the channel.

To change the channel in another room, you need something more clever...
- Put in a loftbox (http://www.tvlink.co.uk/loftbox.htm) at the distribution point.
- The signal from your sky box will feed up from the living room to the loftbox, and out to all the rooms.
- You can tune all your tvs in to the channels on the aerial. You then need to tune the tvs in to the sky channel.
- At each TV, put in a TVLink (http://www.tvlink.co.uk/tvlink.htm). This will capture the signal from the sky remote (say you're watching in the bedroom), and send it back to the living room, to change the sky channel.

pitstop wrote:

Set up for surround sound in sitting room!

Dolby 5.1 is the current standard, but 6.1 and 7.1 are available.

You might know this already but...
5.1 has one central speaker, two satellites at the front corners of the room, and 2 at the rear corners. It also has a seperate subwoofer (bass speaker) which can be located anywhere in the room. 7.1 has 2 additional speakers at either side. I can't remember where the additional speaker is located in a 6.1 setup.

Decide where you would ideally like to locate the speakers. I'm mounting mine on brackets on the wall in each corner, so the cable is coming from the ceiling. But you might want to put your speakers on the floor, or even fit them into the wall or the ceiling. Pick a place to locate the woofer also - hidden out of the way is usually good.

So you need speaker cable from each speaker location back to wherever the surround sound amplifier is located. You don't need to run a cable for the front central speaker unless you are mounting it on the wall/ceiling or away from the tv or cabinet in front of you. You may or may not need to run a cable for the woofer, depending on your chosen location.

pitstop wrote:

Watch and record CCTV from the garden, entrance and gates, baby's bedroom.

You can link a cctv system into the loftbox (or another distribution amp), so it can be watched on any tv in the house. you'll need a cctv system, of which there are many (and I can't recommend any as i haven't used them). TVlink (the loftbox people) have one called sentry.

There are cctv packages available, which contain a switcher (to take input from multiple cameras), motion sensitive cameras, vcr controllers (to record once the motion detectors detect motion. You can get units that will make a noise if they detect motion or automatically change the tv channel

pitstop wrote:

My electrician is happy to do the work (why not - he'll make a fortune!!) but he loses me after the first 2 questions!!

pitstop wrote:

If you can describe in easy English that a thick female could understand - all the better - much appreciated!!

it's hard to cover everything in one general post, so feel free to ask more specific questions, or to pass on the questions your electrician is asking you.

by the way... the choice of cable is important. Your electrician might try to give you RG6 instead of CT100, but insist on CT100. It can be used for both tv and cctv, and is better quality in general.

You won't really notice much difference between cat5e and cat6 for data/network cabling, but cat 6 will be more future proof. In the future (maybe 5-10 years away) you will be able to carry more information (like tv signals) at faster speeds over cat 6. However, connectors and terminators for cat 6, as well as the cable itself will be more expensive.

You can get very expensive speaker cable (the words silver and oxygen free will come up) at 5 or 10 euros per metre, but unless you are a hifi snob spending several thousands on speakers and hifi equipment (and despise mp3) you are unlikely to need it or even notice the difference.

For mere mortals, the best you can get is 79 strand speaker cable. There is also a forty something (it might be 42 strand) cable, that will be more than adequate for most needs. Neither is very expensive.

pitstop

Hi Patrido

WoW!! Fantastic info! To begin with - I like the sound of the iPod docking option - can you tell me some more?

Also do you know what the Apple front end software is called?

I will have to digest this in pieces as it's too much for my head in one go!!

Best

Pitsy

patrido

it's called apple front row

http://www.cyberselect.co.uk/range/923
there are lots of others too which you can find through google, or if you're buying a multi room solution, ask about ipod integration.

tcoen

Where can I get faceplates (and boxes) for termininating the speaker cables? Where can I get RCA faceplates to use in extending scart leads etc?

What about vga faceplates if I want to send signal to a ceiling mounted projectos?

patrido

google, or try maplin, farnell, rs (radionics)

tcoen

Should I run HDMI cable from dvd to projector / TV position in new build?

byte

tcoen wrote:

Should I run HDMI cable from dvd to projector / TV position in new build?

I think that would be a good idea. Better doing it now than regretting it later.

To O.P.:
With regards the amount of CT100 drops in main room, I would suggest at least 4 cable drops:
1 for terrestrial feed (an aerial)
2 for Sky (in case you want to get Sky+ in the future)
1 for feeding signal to loft/distribution point

Also, add an extra cable in other rooms you might consider adding extra Sky digiboxes to in the future (a phone point is also necessary if you go down the road of "Sky Multiroom")

Other than that, I think everything Patrido has said is well documented