Dummies Guide To Whole House Audio On A Budget

Yesterday I came home to a small package I had ordered off eBay and smiled with the satisfaction of knowing I had finally finished my whole house audio project. More on that final piece later.

In my last blog on home theater I explained how you could get a high end Kaleidescape like experience for a fraction of the cost. This time I am going to focus on whole house audio. If you are an audiophile stop reading now. What I am going to explain is a budget conscious setup with a few restrictions. That said I think the audio quality if more than adequate for every day listening. If you are interested in getting music in every room in your house without spending your kids inheritance on a Sonos system then read on.

Let me first cover the capabilities of the system and what is missing compared to a high end system.

• You will need some form of amped or powered speakers in each room you want music in. You may already have this and just not realize. I found a already had a Hi-Fi, TV, iPod dock or radio in every room I wanted to cover except the kitchen.
• You will need to be able to run cable through your house. I tried every wireless solution there is from whole house FM transmitters to the cool and simple Apple Airport Express. For me it had to be wired. Any dropouts, even infrequent or very short destroy the experience.
• This is not a multi-zone system. The same audio goes to every room. This is a big limitation but also results in a simpler and cheaper setup. My kids will just have to like whatever I listen to.

The entire system feeds from a single point. In my family room I have a simple audio/video switch . Audio only switches are hard to find and I already had one of these from my pre-hdmi TV setup. If you have a universal remote I would look for an IR controllable one. Into that switch I feed all my sources:

1. Mac Mini music server
2. Turntable
3. Cable (for cable radio stations)
4. CD Player

I also have an iPod dock that I can switch out when friends are round so they can feed their music into the system.

The Music Server:

My main music source is a mac mini. It has by entire music collection on it. Some things to bear in mind when choosing a computer based music server:

Dedicated is Better:

• I do not use the same mini that is at the heart of my home theater system and running plex. PC and Macs do support multiple sound cards but I wanted to keep things simple for a number of reasons. My home theater mini is new, fast and dedicated to watching video, outputting digital audio to my receiver. My whole house audio mini is the original mini and is set to output analog and run independently of the other system. One big advantage over an apple express or other multi-client system is that ALL audio from the mac mini is sent to every room. No need for Airfoil.

Go Headless:

• I can use the iTunes Remote on my iPhone to control the mini and use screen sharing from another mac for maintenance. I also use Mocha VNC Lite for the iPhone to start internet radio and other audio that cannot be integrated into iTunes. This means this is truly a server. It does not have a display, a keyboard or even a mouse. The BBC Bigscreen iPlayer is especially suited to control via VNC on your iPhone.

Keeping Everything In Sync:

• iTunes just announced a synching feature in 9 that I have not had a chance to look at. Currently I use the excellent Syncopation which allows me to keep all of my iTunes libraries across several macs in sync. I tried various setups but eventually settled on a single master which every other system syncs to. The mini is actually a client and not a master, mainly because I purchase all my music on my laptop or phone and so it makes sense for it to be the master library. Every time I connect my laptop to my home network the music, playlists, podcasts and videos all sync instantly to all my other systems. Wonderful piece of software. 
• [Update January 2013: With the latest versions of iTunes and Home Sharing the need for Syncopation has mostly gone. You still need it if you buy music from somewhere other than iTunes and don't want to manually keep your systems in sync.]

From One Room To Whole House

So how do you feed every room. This bit might shock you but it actually works. I simply run line level audio to

every room. I don't even run it in a hub and spoke model but instead simply have a single run snaking from room to room and splitting off at each point I want audio. No additional amplification of the signal is done.

My first stop is the family room itself. It feeds my receiver which in turn powers my deck as a second zone. Next stop is an iPod dock in my office, then a cd/radio in my dining room. Penultimate stop is a Pyle amp that powers my kitchen in-ceiling speakers and then one long final stretch to the bedroom TV. The total cable length is probably in the range of 100 to 150ft and yet the quality at the end of the line in the bedroom is superb.

Planning and Purchasing

To keep your costs down you need to plan your system and measure your runs carefully, allow some slack and then order you cables from Monoprice. Their prices cannot be beat especially for long runs. I basically split at each room drop using a simple splitter. Make sure you get your male and female connections right, generally good advice, and buy some connectors if needed.

Troubleshooting

Because I didn't plan ahead and extended the system slowly, I often ended up with cable being the wrong gender or too short. As I said before, allow extra length and but extra gender reverses/connectors to be safe.

This brings me back to that final package from ebay. The only real issues I hit was when I added cable radio as an input and my bedroom TV as an output. I instantly created an unwanted cable Ground Loop hum. I ended up fixing this with a cable ground loop isolator from Jensen. Not a cheap solution but it did the job perfectly.

[Update January 2013: My ground loop came back with a vengeance when I moved my audio server to the mac mini. The isolator didn't do the trick, and several other isolators failed to help also. After much research I was pointed to the only real and permanent solution which is to create a true physical barrier via optical isolation. By using the optical out of the mac mini and this excellent low priced DAC from Fiio I was able to completely remove the interference, with the bonus of 24/96 output, and now it sounds better than ever!]

I didn't cost the whole system and your cost will really depend on what powered audio systems you have in place already. And this whole thing is really on made possible with the iTunes remote for the iPod Touch and iPhone.

That said the result is very robust, zero dropouts and you will find yourself listening to more music than ever before.

Bonus Points

If you have a Chumby then you can install this very cool widget chumbiTunes which will allow you to see what is playing in iTunes and change the volume, pause, forward and rewind.