January 06, 2009
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About Multi Room Audio Systems Minimize

Imagine being able to control what music is played in different rooms of the house just by standing in the one spot.

With a multi room audio system you can listen to jazz in the dining room, classical in the bedroom and easy listening on the deck all from the one sound system. You can control volume and music selection for anywhere in the home, allowing you to listen to a CD in one room while someone else listens to the radio in another part of the house.

Multi room audio systems range in complexity from a simple two-room set-up using speakers and home theatre receivers, to a more costly and complex whole house set-up. How much you spend and what system you install will be influenced by a number of factors, including how many rooms you want to have music in and whether you wish to select different songs in each listening area (or just volume control).

Basic systems allow you to have the same source (i.e., CD or DVD or tuner) playing everywhere, but the popular systems are multi-zone, multi-source, allowing you to listen to different sound in different areas at the same time.

You also need to decide whether you want to be able to access your digital music collection, or are happy listening to conventional music sources like CDs. Instead of only offering CD or radio, many systems on the market now allow you to stream audio, whether from a file server or the internet.

When choosing a multi room audio system, it pays to consider what equipment you already have and whether any of this can be incorporated into your new set-up. Also think about the number of people in your household who will be listening to music - if there are only two people you may only need one or two music sources, compared to a family with children where the kids want music that is independent from the adults.

Lastly, take into account the size of your home. You don't want to pay a fortune for a sophisticated multi room audio system and find that the music from each area floods the rest of the house, with heavy metal from the kids' room drowning out your classical sonata in the living room. ...
Audio Systems Latest News Minimize

More and more homeowners are blending high fidelity and architecture to complement their individual lifestyles. As most custom installers know, these days, it’s not just how a home looks but how it sounds.

Over the past decade, multi-room audio has become a necessity for contemporary living. In the old days, having sound around the house typically involved a hi-fi or boom box in every room. Or one unit that you moved about as required.

Today, multi-room audio means just that. It enables every member of the family to listen to whatever they wish – from CDs, DVDs, MP3s, FM and satellite radio or a music server – whenever they want and wherever they desire to listen; even in the bathroom.

The intelligence of a multi-room audio system is generally governed by price: the more you spend, the smarter and more flexible it is. Basic unintelligent offerings can frustrate users – an intelligent system will know the status of the equipment. As an example, if you have a loud party and switch the system off without turning the volume down, an unintelligent system will turn on at the party volume, blasting you out of the home.

Whereas a smart system will have features such as ‘pre set volume turn on’, so it reverts to a lower level without the client having to think and perhaps default to a ‘favourite’ source at turn on, such as their preferred radio station.

It is more likely to be stored on the home PC connected to a music or media server through the home and driven by an RF device such as your increasingly intelligent mobile phone. The server that we are seeing developed in the hi-fi industry will remain an audiophile product, but here again their intelligence is making them an ideal multi-room product as with individual streaming users in one room can select their own music even if someone in another room is already playing the track.

Music servers are fast becoming an essential component in home entertainment systems, with tech-savvy clients insisting on having the ability to record and store their favourite music on a centrally-located ‘data base’ that provides convenient, easy access to a music collection from virtually anywhere in the home.

Higher performance servers also provide jukebox-like features allowing the user to easily create a song list from their music collection that will play in any order they wish, while many models come standard as iPod compatible.