Multiroom Audio Setup

[Unreal]

I work at Bestbuy, and constantly get customer coming in that just purchased a new house that is prewired for audio. They have the living room wired for 5.1, and then 2 speakers in each room of the house. Most have 4-5 rooms wired up. They all want to come in and buy a $200 reciever and have it run all the speakers at once. I tell them they can't do that, cause a 100x5 reciever can't play 10-16 speakers at once.

So, what do they need? Do they need an amp for each room? Is there special stereos/recievers setup for a multiroom setups? I have no idea what to recommend when they want to do this.

[burtlively]

first of all if you want a main setup to run it all you have to utilize a high quality av center with at least 2 or 3 zones. then you have to amplify those zones with an outboard amp (a high quality seven channel amp potentially run at least 14 speakers). that is a start, but to be honest i don't know if you guys at best buy sell the equipment it takes to get this set up.

[Bruinsrme]

This is an expensive venture anyway you cut it.

Take a look at www.smarthome.com I recall seeing a Niles setup on the site. In my travels today I will venture over there and see if I can find something more specific.

Scott

[Bruinsrme]

click here

or

http://www.smarthome.com/audiodist.html

[dougdrake]

OTOH, I'm driving 6 pairs of speakers off a single Yamaha integrated amp (with a CD player and PC as a music source), using an impedance-matching 6-pair speaker selector switch. It works just fine, for my purposes - basic background music. They could probably get away with driving it with the "Speaker B" output of an AVR (if speaker B is an alternate pair of "main" speakers and not rear speakers), but they need something to balance the impedance load...

DD

[burtlively]

nice save doug. i forgot that you can use something like the russound tbl-75 to impedence match and run multiple speakers. it costs around $150 and i'm sure there are multiple manufacturers (niles, etc.)