First, let's define whole-house audio; Whole-house audio is where you have multiple speaker pairs (stereo) in multiple rooms or areas of your home. One or more rooms may have a full surround sound setup. In a surround sound equipped room, although one set of speakers may be shared with the whole-house audio system, they are otherwise separate systems. (We recommend the ABS1 Sound Activated Speaker Level Automatic A-B Switch Box to connect speakers to both audio systems.)

Each set of speakers is known as an audio zone .

There are two basic ways to set up a whole-house audio system. Single source , and multi-source . With single-source, all zones hear the same thing (although some zones may be "off" or have their volume at different levels). With multi-source, each zone may independently select an audio source. The difference in cost and complexity is significant.

Until recently, true multi-source systems were extremely expensive. Recent products from Xantech and others have brought the price, and level of complexity, down significantly.

Because each installation is so different, it would be difficult to give you a step-by-step design guide. If you wish to design your own system, the best way is to become familliar with the equipment available, then you will begin to see the possibilites for your application.

The most important thing we have learned is to decide early on whether you want a multi- or single- source system; Never mix the two. For instance, if you are designing a multi-source system, consider each set of speakers a separate zone . Do not "extend" a zone by paralleling another set of speakers. Although the amp may handle it, and impedence matching devices may correct the load, you'll never be able to control the volume of each set of speakers the way you want.

The last point to get you started... Nearly all whole-house audio systems today have centralized amplifier(s), with speaker level audio running to the remote zones. It is virtually impossible to distribute "line level audio" throughout a home to remote amplifiers without unacceptable levels of hum creeping in.

• For tutorial on whole-house audio, see our Whole-House Audio Tutorial.
• For whole-house audio wire, see Speaker Level Audio Cable in our TechWire area.
• For bringing speaker level audio wires into/out of a room, use 5-Way Binding Posts in our TechWire area.
• For remote control of your audio/video components (infrared distribution), see our Xantech Infrared Products area.
• And for the rest of the whole-house audio components, look through the information in the list at the top of this page.