Need help with new house

PureBred

Hi all,

I really just looking for a bit of advice here. I'm renovating an old house and want to run all cables in the next week or two now that i have the ouse stripped down.

I plan on getting sky in and will base thi in the sitting room. Want to put the magic eye in my bedroom aswell as the kitchen.

I also want to surround sound my bedroom and sitting room.

Just wondering what cables and types i need to run from my central point(Sitting room).

Have a big box of Cat 6 got already. Was hoping this would do for speakers as well as phones and LAN.

Need a bit of help on where to start as i am a bit of a noob!

Thanks in advance!:)

Idleater

you had better do a bit of research into home automation before you do this, because you are opening up a black hole when it comes to money.

For a start, there is a difference between linking all the rooms over a network, and distributing sound over a network, or distributing sound from a central location to remote locations.

If you plan on running a distribution amplifier to power several external audio zones (from an AV processor) then you can run speaker cable or use cat6 as speaker cable to the locations of the speakers in your zones.

If you plan on sending audio over a network to be decoded in another zone and pushed through amp/speakers in that zone, then you need some server(s) capable of doing this coding/decoding.

If I have just confused you, you might be best giving some home automation installation companies a call as they will probably save you money overall for a system that will actually do what you want it to do.

Rew

Use your Cat 6 for network and phone. I would run more then your going to use as there is aways the chance of haveing a dead run. Run that all to one central place and get a patch panel to terminate on.

For audio consider a network music system like sonos or squeezebox. Squeezebox has better bang for buck but requires a PC/server running to work.

For audio cables use proper speaker wire not Cat 6 its alot less bulky but id say either would work (not sure about the quality of the Cat 6 as speaker wire though).

When running it for the surround sound wire it back to where your surround amp is going to be (uasally near the TV). If you want surround from sky in both rooms you will have to run speaker wire from the amp to the other room.

For your sky you will need 2 lengths of satellite coax brought to the location of the sky box from the dish location. For the magic eye regular TV coax is used.

PureBred

Ya i'm not oing to use Cat 6 for the speakers as quality would be ****!
Going to get some 16 guage speaker wire instead.

I have experience with Cat 6 and patch panels so going to run 2 cables to every room anyways, just in case.

Don't think i would like the idea of a server running to power my speakers.
Would also like to have 2 different sound systems in the bedroom and in the sitting room as when i am watching tv from my room i dont want the speakers in the sitting room runnin also.

Any more ideas.

Thanks to nereid and Rew for ur ideas!

PureBred

Just saw these and got me interested. Anyone know much about them?

Rew

ricfeen wrote: »

Just saw these and got me interested. Anyone know much about them?

These?

PureBred

Sorry these balun things. The only bad this is that they need power i think.

http://www.svideo.com/videobalun1.html

Spinnaker

A blanks AV/data/control canvas to work with ... Nice :-)

Maybe get the infrastrucutre right now to get futureproofed, even if costly and have to compromise on equipment. Equipment is easily added ,upgraded later.

Speaker cable. Definitely not CAT 6. its all about resistance matching: 16AWG good in general but some guides say 24, 48 feet for 4, 8 ohm speakers respectively. For longer runs lay 14,12 AWG.

I believe any data/audio/video cables should be chased, laid at least 40mm from any electrical drops.

Consider running some CAT6/5/Coax to your doors and gates for future intercoms/gate/camera control.

Your desire is for multiple WIRED zones. Maybe cable up with those extra CAT cables AS IF you owned a multi-zone-controller for 4-8 zones. MCZs are just another rack in your hifi system or central rack. You'd have control panels at switch height. Lay the cable now, adjacent to switches. Leave blanked off boxes perhaps or cut wall on redecorating in the future.

SONOS is essentially a wireless solution. Worth investigating. Add a NAS drive so you wont need to have PC powered up for music.

Im haveing good success streaming music with inexensive Apple Airport Express

Quantity of cables and racks add up very fast even in a standard living room set up. Consider centering as much as possible say under that stairs/elsewhere and viewing living room as a node.

Wireless access points/routers like elevation. Consider enough of these, location of these and necessary AC sockets.

Consider advantages/disadvanges of wall mounted speaker terminals boxes. Mount high or low adjacent to co-ax network.

LAN test those cables before the walls go up.