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New Adventures In Hi-Fi

12 April, 2015

Last week, my live-in lover became my live-out lover. After six wonderful months, followed by a couple of distinctly variable ones, we decided that all of us (me, her, my three kids) living together wasn’t in the best interests of our mental health and serenity, so we rolled back to the ‘last working version’, and started living apart again. Traumatic as this was, it did have one bright spot: I got the opportunity to put together a multi-room speaker system for her new house, which is a project I’ve always wanted to undertake (at least until I discovered Sonos and realized that a wireless system was much easier…).

To be fair, I only really got the green light from the GF because a lot of the work had already been done by the previous owners. They had installed in-ceiling speakers in five of the rooms already (study, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, master bathroom), and had a full surround-sound system in the living room. They took the living room surround-sound speakers with them (leaving some sizeable holes in the walls either side of the TV, and wires poking out of the walls where the rear speakers used to be, but all of the ceiling speakers were still there in the other rooms. They’d handily run all of these wires to a closet in the hallway that they had stacked with a bunch of AV equipment, which was all nice and easy for them because it is a one-storey house, which makes running cables between rooms and accessing the ceiling to recess speakers nice and easy. I had a poke around in the attic and they hadn’t done the neatest job, but the wiring was at least there, so it seemed like a waste to not use it. For me, this would have been a major selling point of the house, but for the GF it was probably a negative point on account of the ceiling ‘clutter’ introduced by the speakers and the ‘unnecessary’ wiring all over the attic, but clearly she just wasn’t seeing the potential that I did.

The previous owners must have been wannabe electricians as they had also run CAT5 cables and HDMI cables all around the house, even providing actual sockets in the wall for most of these (which makes me wonder why they didn’t run speaker posts into the walls instead of just having holes there…). They had also installed a whole slew of additional lighting in various ceilings and walls, including half a dozen spots in the bedroom that were aimed at the walls, but I did notice that they were on swivel brackets and could easily be flipped round to point at the bed. Apparently the previous owner was a ‘keen photographer’, so who knows what was going on there… Thankfully there were too many spotlights, speakers, and air vents in the bedroom ceiling for them to have installed a mirror… Anyway, I decided to content myself with the sound system, and not think too much about the lighting arrangements (although replacing the bulbs in them all with Philips Hue bulbs would be an interesting prospect…).

The first job was to put some speakers back into the living room. There’s pretty much zero chance of the GF bothering with surround sound for the living room (hell, she didn’t even see the need for HD vs. regular TV…) so I figured I may as well use the existing ‘front speaker’ wiring and attach some in-wall speakers to them instead of adding ceiling speakers to match the rest of the house. Besides, these speakers could easily be repurposed should she ever decide that The Young and the Restless really was best appreciated in full 5.1 surround sound… I picked up a pair of fairly inconspicuous Polk in-wall speakers, and installed these where the existing holes were on either side of the TV. This did mean expanding what were initially 2″ diameter holes in the drywall for wires into 10″ x 7″ rectangular holes that I could drop the speakers into, which looked a bit excessive when I first cut the holes, but once the speakers were in they looked fairly unobtrusive (and better than the holes…). The instructions said that the speaker grilles could be painted over with no significant lack of fidelity, so there’s an option to blend them in a bit better if she redecorates.

Speakers

After installing the new speakers into the living room, we had six rooms wired for sound. The next problem was that although there were volume controls in most of the rooms, there was curiously no volume control in the (open plan) kitchen, and none for the speakers that I’d installed in the living room (I guess I could have installed a volume switch in the living room at the same time as I added the speakers (they’re basically just dimmer switches), but that would have involved punching even more holes into the wall, and I didn’t want to push my luck. So I ‘installed’ (actually I just put it on a shelf – but I did have to put up the shelf…) a speaker switching box into the ‘AV cupboard’ that could handle six pairs of speakers, and that also had independent volume controls for each of these sets. The downside to this is that you can only control the volume for the kitchen and the living room from here, but at least you could control the volume. As an added bonus the speaker switch includes two sets of inputs, and independent on/off switches for each of these per set of output speakers, meaning that we could pump separate sources into different combinations of the rooms, as required. Given that the GF’s sister is also living there, this may prove to be a fairly useful option.

Sonos Amp

The last step was providing a source. The GF doesn’t even own a stereo, and pretty much just listens to Rhapsody and a handful of MP3s she’s downloaded to her phone (they used to be downloaded to a generic MP3 player (we share a hatred of Apple…), but I finally managed to get her to move stuff to her phone when she upgraded that, recently) through a portable speaker, so I just needed to get something to support the same. I could have just had her plug her phone in to the new speaker system via a 3.5mm to split pair cable, but that’s just so low-tech. I have Sonos at my house, and we both kind of like the convenience of that (we both have the Sonos app on our respective phones already, for controlling my system) so the logical solution was to get her a Sonos Amp. This connects to her existing wireless network (I can add a Bridge later (to allow the Sonos kit to run across its own, separate network), if drop-outs / buffering are a problem, but I doubt if that will happen as there’s not a lot of other traffic on the network), supports Rhapsody (and Pandora, which I’m an avid user of), has a stream for our favorite NPR station (which we have both become addicted to listening to of a weekday morning), and will also let her play all of the stuff on her phone (and on my phone, when I come over, so we can re-initiate those arguments of who gets to choose the music while we shower…). The other advantage of the Sonos Amp is that if she decides she needs to add sound to any other rooms, or to the back garden, she can just get a Sonos Play speaker and attach that to the same network, without the need for any additional wiring. So I dropped the Amp in and connected it to one of the inputs on the speaker switch (I’ll leave the other one for her sis – although she could also piggy-back on the Sonos network and play whatever is on her phone…), and we were in business! Music streaming throughout the entire home, after only a couple of hours of work – which, judging by the sarcastic “Yay!” I got when I announced it was complete, I should have spent doing some of the more pressing chores on her honey-do list, but I reason that you have to have music while you work, so the other chores should now get done in no time (honest, honey!).

Of course she probably never will stream music throughout the entire house (she’s not as obsessive about music as I am – I have music playing in one or other room pretty much all the time I am in my house – hell, I even stream my Pandora ‘Shoegaze’ station all night long, to sleep to…), but she could, and that’s what matters…

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