What type of receiver/stereo/device do I get?

BurntNewt · May 12

I have a house that has 5 rooms with 2 speakers each they all lead to a cabinet in the living room, what type of device do I get for them? I attached pictures with the speaker and the speaker wires, I only see 5 speaker wire so I assume it's wired in parallel for each room that has them. Is there anyway to make it smart so I can choose which room I stream to via Bluetooth? Is there a device that lets me to it via Bluetooth at all?

seanondemand · May 12

You would need a multi-zone controller, or multiple amplifiers. With 5 zones, you would be into pretty fancy gear territory if you wanted to use just one device. What I would do is hunt down some used gen 2 Sonos Amps.

Omon_Ra · May 14

This is going to be a bit long-winded, but I was an AV tech/installer for 6 years and this is something we did A LOT. New home buyer gets a house with whole-home audio, and is left with 'what do now?' For the unprepared, it can snowball in price rapidly.

As @seanondemand said, a 5-zone setup can get very expensive very quickly. What is your budget? You aren't going to want to use Bluetooth, something network connected is going to be far better. Which then means you may need to upgrade your wireless/home network if you want to maintain full coverage for streaming and control throughout the house. The other big factor is how badly do you NEED different music playing in the different rooms at the same time? You could cut cost quite a bit with a single streaming amp and a multi-zone speaker selector/volume control. This also begs the question if there are volume controls in each room. They're either a rotary knob or a slider in a typical single gang switch box/wallplate, usually close to the room's light switch.

Second hand gear if you have a strict budget will be the way to go. I prefer Yamaha and their MusicCast app over Sonos, but in the end it's a lot of personal preference. There are some cheaper solutions like Arylic; I've only installed a few of those and they were fine, they're cheap and they work. It still works with AirPlay and an app.

Being that there's 5 pairs of speaker wires in that cabinet, are you sure that's the actual 'home run' location of the room speakers and not that specific room's (I'm assuming great/living room or den/game room-type area) 5-channel speaker runs? In a typical whole-home audio install, it does all go back to a media cabinet; but 99% of the time it's in pairs. Either a pair of 16/2 per room (4 total wires for 2 speakers) or a single piece of 16/4 (red, black, white, green wires) per room. What are all the other speaker wires that have the clear insulation? You can tone out and label the speaker wires if you have an existing amp very easily. If you don't already have an amp, you'll need another person, but you can use a fresh AA battery to tap the wires to the battery connections and you should hear a light popping noise. Sounds kinda sketchy, but it does work and won't harm the speaker. The other option is buying an actual toner; those will come with banana clips and play a doodely noise through the line to the speaker...assuming the wire isn't cut/damaged or the speaker isn't completed dead.

If the cabinet with all the speaker wires is at a TV location as well, I would go with a 2-zone AV receiver and speaker selector/volume control to start. From there, you can decide if you really need a dedicated amp per room. Something like the Yamaha RX-V6A or any of their older 2-zone models if you can find them. They'll be either 7.1 or 9.1 channel receivers; if it's only 5.1 it will NOT have a zone 2. That pretty much goes for any brand, regardless if it's Yamaha or not. If it is indeed just a cabinet for the room speakers, a simple stereo receiver with a 6 zone (they don't really make 5-zone) speaker selector would do.

The other thing I would do is pop off the grilles and check the condition of the speakers. Those older style speaker grilles can be a pain to get out, but you want to pry at the edge of the grille and the 'lip' of the speaker and the grille should come out. The metal is almost always super thin, so you'll likely bend the edge of the grille that goes up into the speaker, but it's easy enough to bend back. If you're REALLY curious about the wiring, you could take the whole speaker out of the ceiling and see how they're wired; if it is indeed in parallel (which is quite honestly very uncommon) or the typical pair per speaker.

ChrisLoudon · 2024-05-22T13:31:10Z

On 5/12/2024 at 7:49 PM, BurntNewt said:

I have a house that has 5 rooms with 2 speakers each they all lead to a cabinet in the living room, what type of device do I get for them? I attached pictures with the speaker and the speaker wires, I only see 5 speaker wire so I assume it's wired in parallel for each room that has them. Is there anyway to make it smart so I can choose which room I stream to via Bluetooth? Is there a device that lets me to it via Bluetooth at all?

Hi buddy,

What's your budget?

Have you thought of getting some used Gen 1 Sonos Connect Amps?

Had a quick look on Google and you can pick one up for about £75. You would need 5 of them so around £375 for the lot.

Each Amp would drive 2 speakers and all amps can be zoned individually or together to pay different stuff in each room or the same stuff in all / some of the rooms.

If you didn't need 5 separate zones then from my own experience, a Connect Amp can drive 4 speakers safely.

The only downside to this method would be these older Sonos items are not compatible with newer items like the Move, Roam and Arc so if you ever wanted to expand your portfolio of Sonos hardware then you would need separate apps to control them.