We’re building a house, and while the walls are open, I want to install ceiling speakers in various rooms. Ideally, we could stream music from our phones to said speakers, and they would be zoned, so if the husband is playing music in the garage, I don’t have to listen to it in the bedroom. Connecting to TVs is fine, but not really the point, we don’t watch much. I don’t want to spend more than a few hundred on this. We are not audiophiles, so this doesn’t need to be super fancy.
However, I have no idea how to set this up.
I’m looking atthese speakers from monoprice. What other equipment do I need? We aren’t Apple people, so I want to stay away from anything that requires itunes.
You are going to need several different amps, one for each zone. I would just have a single hard-line input for each zone, and wire that to the amp, and then the amp to the speakers.
If you really prefer a wireless system, you’ll want to just go bluetooth, which is more expensive, but doesn’t require an amp. Personally, I’d go bluetooth, but it’s up to you.
What is more important than the speakers is of course the wiring. In the life of the house you will almost certainly go through a number of generations of technology. But a common thread is going to be the fixed wiring. And augmenting that once the walls and ceiling are done is painful and expensive.
I would work out every possible place you could want speakers, and run cable to those locations, and run them all back to a single location where you can install appropriate distribution amplifiers and gear. You can choose that, and change it over, anytime. You will want a closet somewhere that also has a power outlet, and for preference is also cabled so you can Internet access directly to it. Then you make this your hub for all things.
I will note that ceiling speakers are a mixed bag. Sound from above never sounds right. Thinking about in-wall installations is something to consider as well. Just running the cables so they are there if ever wanted is a very cheap thing to do right now.
I’d put ceiling speakers in a class with a 1960’s hi-fi set. And recall that most houses with them used them very, very little.
While I dislike wireless anything unless it’s the best option by far, wireless speaker tech has gotten steadily better and is likely to get better over the next decade. Rather than spend time and expense building old-school, deteriorating fixtures in the house, with the small but present degradation of each room’s look, and the need for fairly expensive speakers, wiring, amps, distribution panels etc., on the vague notion that you will want to stream music all over the house… wire the house instead for the highest-quality ethernet ports (Cat6+). Not so you you can wire in any particular piece of gear - although you might want to, for a server stack or an office computer, or the video/audio head-end - but so you can distribute any generation of wireless APs through the house and have solid coverage without dead zones or one uber-powerful and expensive point. (I personally like Ubiquiti’s Unifi pucks; look at them as a high-end consumer-grade example.)
Then you can upgrade your base wifi installation over time and use whatever audio, video, computing or convenience gear needs good, solid wireless to work.
You can do it with one amp and a distributer. Hook the amp to this as well as all the speakers and you can turn each set of speakers on and off individually. I believe with many of them (this one included), they can have two inputs and send one or the other to any of the outputs.
I’m not sure what you mean by using bluetooth without an amp. My phone has bluetooth, but there’s no way to transmit the music in my phone to the speaker wires without an amplifier. However, many home audio receivers can receive bluetooth or wifi signals.
You will need an electrical box for each speaker. This box is where the wiring comes into and is secure to. Then your speakers will be secured to the box
For every light switch (or receptacle, etc) all you see is the outside which is the switch and the plate. There is a box behind that all the electrical wiring is contained in. This is required by code, and there are safety considerations here also.
Also most likely you have 2 sets of wires. One set is the power wires to power the speaker, then the other set is the speaker wire. Unless your going with wifi speakers.
Yes, and you plug them in wherever convenient. I ass/u/me that if you’re down to prewiring speakers you’ve considered the minor upgrade of extra wall sockets - at least two on every available wall.
Overheads can be a good choice. But mostly, it’s a good choice for light commercial and professional offices. Even in their heyday, I remember them not being used much because of the hassles, and because it’s rare that everyone in the house really wants to listen to the same material on the same schedule.
I wouldn’t even bother hardwiring a speaker system into a house anymore, especially ceiling speakers since they never do soundright. I’d rather have something like good quality portable bluetooth speaker for each room. You can put them on a shelf at ear level and fill the room with pretty decent sound that would be as good or better than ceiling speakers. I use a Bose Soundlink out in my garage and the patio and have since removed the speakers I previously had installed.
I considered saying this too. However, maybe the OP has an interior decoration reason she wants them in the ceiling. If not, you are obviously correct, IMHO.
Design wise I’d just make a pocket in the drywall with a standard 110 outlet and place a portable bluetooth speaker in there. You could then cover it up with some sort of acoustically transparent grill material and control the on/off and volume with a remote. As technology progressed you could just replace them with newer models that almost definitely be smaller than what is available now.
If you do want to install ceiling speakers, you have to do some planning and a usable system will cost more than a few hundred dollars. You’ll spend a few hundred dollars on speakers if you do a few rooms and you need a multi-zone receiver or pre-amplifier. The basic problem is that you need an amplifier channel per speaker (another few hundred dollars). If you want two speakers in each of three rooms, you need six channels of amplification and something to coordinate them. And you need to run the speaker wire from wherever these components will live to the rooms where the speakers will be. Whole house music systems like this aren’t simple and if you try to do it yourself without learning all about it you stand a good chance of making a system which is useless.
In short, you need speakers, speaker wire (you have to use wire rated for in-wall applications), amplification (one channel per speaker), and a component which takes multiple music sources and feeds them to the chosen rooms. Or you could get a couple of bluetooth speakers, pair them with your phones, and bring them to the rooms where you want music. I think you’d be happier with the latter and you’d be spared the ugly speakers in your ceilings.
We have something like that. Control4 8-zone amp and controller. (In the words of the Far Side, “this no be cheap”.)
Run the wires from the individual speakers back to the amp. make sure the gauge can handle the power.
Our speakers in the ceiling are inside plastic inserts to keep them inside the insulation/vapour barrier.
The controller works with wifi. If you don’t need to control things from outside your home, a simple iPhone app will manage the system… The controller also has TunedIn Radio.
This replaced a previous system that had control panels around the house - but the individual room amp modules in the central amp started dying.
But all in all, it will cost thousands of dollars.
We currently have a couple little bluetooth speakers that sound great, but dragging them around they get beat-up and stop working well. Some friends of ours have a zoned ceiling speaker system that they love and use all the time, but I think I’m convinced that such a thing is either already obsolete or quickly becoming so.
I think we’ll just buy a little bluetooth speaker for each room, so we aren’t moving them around, and call it done.
I did this in a house I was having built. I knew where the TV & receiver would go so I added a double-gang electrical box behind the receiver and put single-gang boxes where each speaker would go.
I then ran speaker cord between the boxes originating from the main receiver box. I included a couple feet coiled in each box to make hookup easier later. Any kind of wire works, no need to go with expensive Monster cable or anything. You can buy it in 100 foot rolls from Home Depot. It looks like 14 or 16-gauge lamp cord. Don’t cheap out on the really thin stuff, it’s a pain to work with and might cost a bit of sound quality over longer distances.
When the walls were put up, the installers just cut the wallboard around the boxes like any other electrical box. I could the put up speaker wallplates. myself and be nearly done. When we moved in, it’s just use a bit of wire between the speaker or receiver and the wall plate and everything connects up.
In new home construction the electricians will often run low voltage wire for speaker and media systems. Quite often it is on the blueprint. There are also home entertainment contractors that are brought in to set everything up. It is low voltage so it doesn’t actually require a box. Some times the wires are just left behind the drywall and speakers and wall plates are installed during final finishing. When planning for wall mounted TVs, 2" conduit is often installed so multiple cords can be run down to components below.
It doesn’t cost much to make sure a home is wired up for future media rooms, ethernet, etc if you already have the walls open and electricians coming anyway. Electricians have been running cat5e instead of telephone wiring for years, so many homes will already be wired for ethernet. You can often just switch out the telephone jacks for rj45 plates.
As the op has already concluded though, modern wireless is a good enough and versatile solution.
