The wife's gone nuts. In our offer to buy the next place (bottom floor condo of a restored, old, 2 story house), we wrote in that I get to go run speaker wire before they sheetrock it. Now, suddenly, what she meant by that was that I have to figure out and make happen the following setup, somehow:

- One system in the living room to watch movies on,
- One system (or possibly same, but with just 2 settings...that and this) to listen to satellite radio or an ipod throughout the rest of the house,
- With volume knobs for each room, and
- Speakers flush with the ceiling.

I know about the switchbox-sized volume knobs that mount on the wall, where you can cut back sent volume 0% to 100%, but what I don't get is what in the hell is going to push the 14 speakers I need to install?? Am I to run a simple little home theater setup, WITH the needed extra inputs for sat radio / ipod, and then send it out to a separate amp with a switch, or what?!?

Even if you're not sure, but you know of a good resource for this, I'm all ears. Bless her heart, she gets to say "I want (x)" and I get to figure out how to make it so. And it was all I could do not to smother her with a pillow last night.

Being a strictly 2-channel Luddite, I admit to knowing absolutely nothing about HT and whole-house installations. If nobody here can help with yr dilemma, you might want to go over to audiokarma.org and post a similar question in the Home Theater forums- lotsa tech-savvy folks there.

Much obliged.

This project may drive me back to 2 channel m'self.

Fucking call me on my cell phone because I sure as hell aint typing this shit out.

Call me about 1pm est

Roger dodger.

Yeah she just called me at work to discuss this. Honestly it doesn't sound like a big job since the walls are not up in the new place yet. I know for a fact that there are things like this out there. It's just a matter of how much you guys are willing to spend for it.

Call Kurtz. That's what I'd do.

You need a special amp for this type of setup. Usually these types of amplifiers have a number of Zones (read: Rooms) that they can support.

I would highly recommend going to some high-end audio/video store in your area, pretend to be filthy rich, and talk about what you want to accomplish. They can probably provide you with a good starting point as to what you are going to need to buy. After that, its really just a matter of hooking it all up correctly, which, really isn't all that hard (especially if your walls are still open).

The only concerns I have besides where the magical money for this will appear from, are thus:

1. The home-runs of speaker wire from each pair... do i run them all back to one spot or another spot, depending on equipment (closet vs ent. ctr)
2. Do I install the actual speakers before the sheetrock, or (as I suspect) after?
3. Are there special amps for these sorts of things available somewhere normal, or are they ALL super-expensive?

etc. My problem last night was that her rationale was "I saw it in somebody else's house before, so it should be easy." My rebuttal was "that house was like $500,000, and they PAID somebody probably $20,000 to do all that shit. For a reason."

1. You run them all back to where you want the amp to be. Having a seperate "media closet" is an option, but i don't think it is necessary.
2. you install the housing for the speakers pre-sheetrock. There are special housings you can buy that are designated for "new construction." Post sheetrock and/or plaster, the speakers and grills go on.
3. The cheapest 6 room amp I've ever seen was $800 at http://www.hometech.com/ But in general, its going to be expensive.

You don't need to pay someone to do it, though. Running and connecting wires is the easy part. Knowing WHAT wires to run, and deciding where they should go is the hard part. its all in the prep work.

The prep work is no biggie, at all, as far as knowing what to do. I was electrician for a bit, and still have all my tools (though my makita did just take a shit on me). I don't mind running the speaker wire, I'm just scared that I'll run things to one location and then we decide it'd be better off somewhere else, and I have doubts about whatever device we decide on as a "central" unit (tuner, dvd player, etc) having outputs to go to the multi-room amp. She doesn't want more than one device showing. She wants one of those cute, small, 1-space, do-it-all units that are tuner / rewceiver / dvd player all in one.

I gotta tell ya from the emails she's sending me she seems to be on the right track. There are some good ideas here.

When finished, yes. When paying for materials, no. And she completely misses why it's awesome to use the airport ipod thingy you were telling us about, to control your emusic from the pc instead of docking the actual ipod. Mostly because WE DON'T HAVE A GODDAM IPOD YET.

I just did this while my new house was being built, though not quite as extravagant as you're planning. I'm on a tight budget to get mine done, so that may be of some help. My home theater room setup is all independent of the rest of the house (I just thought it to be much easier this way). I just ran wire pre-sheetrock for six speakers throughout the house back to one closet where receiver, disc changer, etc. will be located.

I documented through notes and digital photos where the speaker wire was left so that I can go back once I have plopped money down for speakers (I'm obviously holding off and doing those after the sheet-rock process, since my house is completed now, duh). I plan to use a speaker selector box located in the closet to turn on/off my "zones", and the selector box has volume controls for each speaker built in. I was going to do the wall mounts, but just figured cost-wise it wasn't necessarily worth it for me.

All the components (speakers, selector box) I'm getting through partsexpress.com. They have decent enough stuff on the cheap. And they have stuff that I believe would work for your situation. Then again, I'm no expert.

Au contraire. That's top-shelf advice. Thanks man! God this is a lot to plan out. There's no Way I'm gonna hit 3000 posts by the end of the week now...

Fuck it. Go wireless.

Alright, here's what I think we're gonna go with, and why.

A company called Integra (upscale sister brand of Onkyo, which I have now and love) makes a receiver that's THX 7.1, and has a second zone that will run all the ceiling speakers in the house. It's 100 watts to each channel in surround, which is more than healthy, and that Niles thing (7 zones, $3,000+) doesn't even do surround. This one is easier to use, more flexible in some ways, and should cost me less than $900.

But here's the killer part. All those sets of ceiling speakers in the other rooms are controlled by little wall touchpads, with just a volume & on/off button on each pad. You can take the remote with you into the bathroom or whatever, point it at the touchpad, and change it from radio to cd or ipod or whatever, as well as adjust volume / mute. And you don't have to run speaker wire to each of the touchpads... this is the wierd/cool part... just Cat5. You run cat 5 to each pad, and it has its own 7watt amp to run the speakers in the ceiling, which is enough to get decent volume on low-power speakers, and you run (in my case) like 200ft less speaker wire (which adds up). Only speaker wire runs are from each pad to the speakers in that room, and the theater runs. Then the theater speakers will all be in-wall except the center, which will be a flat-ish wide one mounted right below the flat-screen, which I'm thinking may be one of the new LG's where you just slide a dvd into it like an iMac instead of using a separate dvd player in the closet.

Here's (http://integrahometheater.com/model.cfm?class=Receiver&m=DTR-6.5&p=i) the receiver, if anyone's curious. Not a whole lot different from the Redlands setup, really, but definately more controllable from all those rooms. We're also thinking of resale, here.