Believe it or not, this will be our first foray into whole house audio. Sure, we have a bluetooth speaker we occasionally stream to, but the sound is crappy (it’s tiny because who wants a large speaker sitting on the counter) and we never carry the speaker anywhere except the kitchen. Since we’re building a new house from scratch it seemed like a no brainer to specify in-ceiling speakers in locations we’d like to listen to music. Our home builder offers a complete 3 room Sonos solution that just works the day you move in, but you pay dearly for convenience. Also, their system can only stream a single source to one or more sets of speakers, but does not allow multiple simultaneous streams to multiple speakers (e.g., Karla streams song A in both the kitchen and family room while I stream song B in the basement). For a just a little work after move in, we can have a more flexible system, including speakers in a fourth room, for less money.
SpeakerCraft AIM8 FIVE Series 2 In-Ceiling speaker
Luckily the home builder will just install in-ceiling speakers for us, so we’re putting in pairs of 8” SpeakerCraft speakers in four locations: kitchen, family room, outdoor living space, and over a future pool table location in the basement. All speaker wires are run to a central location in the basement. That is the key. I just need to add four Sonos AMPs to that central location and we can stream music to any or all of the speakers.
Sonos is pretty cool. From within the Sonos app a user can select which zones to play music to, from a single zone to all. So Karla can listen to something in the kitchen while I’m playing something else (almost certainly an entirely different genre :-)) outside. During a party we might decide to play the same music to all zone simultaneously. Sonos allows that.
