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Non-smart, distributed sound system

The requirements were simple:

1. Play back audio from any one of our two HiFi stacks in any of the rooms of our flat.
2. Allow selection of the audio source playing in a room from that same room.
3. Sound received from a distant HiFi stack should still play in stereo.
4. Don’t spend thousands of Euros on the setup.
5. Re-use as much of our existing HiFi equipment as possible.

So it is clear that any fancy smart multi-room audio solution was out of the question. Too expensive, unlikely to allow us to reuse our existing equipment, potentially finicky, subject to software problems, and hard to repair. Plus, it is likely to clog up our wifi.

Instead, we went with the simplest possible approach:

Just add cheap multiway switches between our HiFi equipment and the loudspeakers.

For our current flat with its 3 rooms plus kitchen and bathroom, this means, in terms of additional hardware needed:

• 4 multiway rotary switches
• 20 meters (or so) of additional loudspeaker cable
  • (optional) some slim cable ducts to hide the cables behind
• a dozen stereo loudspeaker clamp terminals
• cardboard/wood to build some simple boxes to house the wiring

We also chose to drill through our some of our walls to significantly reduce the required wire lengths.

You’d think you need 4 wires to transport a stereo signal, but (as many headphone jacks can attest), you only need 3. Left, Right, and Ground. (In fact, you might be fine with just 2, if the electric wires in your entire flat share the same ground. However, horrible things can happen when that isn’t the case so we opted to stay on the safe side.) We carefully determined, which amplifier output terminals could be combined into “ground” and which actually carried the stereo signals.

Schematic

Limitations

Generally, we are very happy with this system and we make use of it almost daily. We only have two gripes with the current setup:

1. There is no sound in the bathroom.
2. Audio from the Bluetooth receiver in the kitchen can’t get forwarded to other rooms.