Rock and Roll in Every Room

If you’re like most folks, you love your music.  When you’re at home, you might always have some tunes playing.  Perhaps you have carefully assembled your music library over the years, from your jazz CD collection to your complete set of Led Zeppelin albums purchased on ITunes.    

Beyond your library, there’s also always modern pop, alternative rock, or other music genres to enjoy on Spotify.  You want the convenience of streaming music, but you also deserve the sound quality of your lossless digital library.

So how can you achieve great sound everywhere in your home, maybe even outside, as the Northwest summer is finally beginning here in Bellevue?  And how can you have the convenience of dialing up what you want to hear on your favorite remote control, your smartphone?

Let us give you a few ideas about how to make it happen.  Just keep reading.

SEE ALSO: Whole Home Audio-Video Solutions

 

Background Listening

The best option for getting high-quality audio in a room - without upsetting the décor – is built-in speakers.  Sonance is one of our speaker partners, and they are a specialist in built-in speakers for indoor and outdoor uses.  Sonance has architectural speakers – and subwoofers -  that can handle background listening and even home theater duties, depending on the model.  They also make distribution amplifiers to provide the signal needed to feed multiple rooms of audio at once. 

For architectural speakers, you need to run wiring inside walls and in ceilings.  Ideally, this is something that is done when building or remodeling, but there are many tricks to hiding wiring, and we are specialists at retrofitting where that is at all feasible. 

With a wired system, you have many choices for sources.  One solution is a multi-zone AV receiver, such as one from our partner Denon.  This receiver can pull double duty in a family room for TV and movie watching.  With 2^nd and 3^rd zones depending on the model, someone could be watching a show, even with surround sound, and you could still have a music source playing in different rooms in your home. 

There are other options for a wireless system and combinations of wired and wireless systems where that makes sense.  Our partner Sonos is a pioneer in wireless connected speaker systems.  The have various sizes of tabletop speakers and a sound bar which can all work in tandem to create a multi-room system.  Sonos mobile app integrates multiple music sources, like your iTunes library, Spotify, Pandora, and others, and makes it easy to direct which content to play in each room. 

Sonos Connect is an easy way to bring the power and ease of Sonos streaming to existing equipment or a whole house built-in speaker system.  It is a wireless module that can connect to either powered or passive (unpowered) speakers, and make those speakers part of a whole house setup. 

 

Dedicated Listening Room

If you are a true audiophile, perhaps you want one room where you sit for critical listening of your favorite music.  That may be the system you may use for a home theater, or simply may be a two-channel system in an office or den. 

For this room, you might want some higher quality bookshelf or floor standing speakers for your stereo listening, such as models from our partner Monitor Audio.  The system could be powered by a high-end Denon receiver or a Marantz separates (preamp and amplifier) system.  If you have a Sonos system for the rest of the house, a Sonos Connect will turn this room into another part of your multi-room system.

A professionally installed distributed audio system will give you endless possibilities.  And we didn’t even cover yet how you could listen to your favorite news show everywhere in your house.

Want to learn more? Call us today at (253) 353-4432; we’d love to show you!