Audio Distribution Question

khurram

Hi every one,
I am first time going to Designing Audio Distribution I have around 8 Room I mean 8 zones. Some room are very big so for that I plan to use 8 speakers. on Client requirement he want two Audio key pad in one room one right side entrance second on left side entrance is it possible two audio keypad (DAS-MET-6SRC) connect on one zoon . Second thing he have 65? plasma in this room and he want plasma audio in these ceiling speakers. How I can connect audio with these speakers . Audio amplifier and audio controller in control room . And all 8 speaker wire I have to pull to control room. How long speaker cable I can pull or how I can calculate speaker wire.
I am going to use these products from AMX.
1- Delta Audio Controller DAS-M0408
2- Keypad DAS-MET-6SRC
3- Amplifiers Carbon XA
4- 100 8? AMX Speaker
Plz help me if any body can.

ericmedley

Firstly,

If you set up an array to handle the audio zone source selection, you should have no trouble with multiple keypads controlling a room.

One method is choosing a series of keypad buttons and forcing them to 'tell you' which audio zone the user if referring to.

example: any keypad pushing buttons 1-8 is referring to zone 1, sources 1-8
any keypad pushing buttons 11-18 is zone 2, sources 1-8
any keypad pushing buttons 21-28 is zone 3, sources 1-8
etc...

Another method is to use the same button numbers for source selection on every keypad (ex. 1-8) and put them in array and use the device numer to determin which zone they're referring to.

Still another method whould be to create an array that assinges any number of random buttons to a particular zone/input. That way, which keypad and which button doesn't really matter that much. You'd use the GET_LAST method for this.

Now, as far as the TV audio is concerned. There you just treat the TV's Audio as just another source in the audio matrix.

Here's a sample:

1. Whole House AM/FM tuner
2. Whole House CD player
3. Whole House Satellite Radio Reciver
4. WHole house iPod.
5. TV's Satellite Recvr.
6. TV's DVD player
7. TV's Video Game
etc...

Now you just use whatever button method from above and 'hit' the proper button in code to call up the correct audio input for that zone.

Using my first button example, let's say your TV room is audio zone 3 (buttons 21-28)

to run the TV's satellite into the speakers you'd hit button 25 in code.


Now, as far as speakers/wire lengths etc... The main issue in using 8 speakers depends upon how you go about setting it up. If you plan on doing 4 sets of stero from one stereo amp, you'll have to be carefull to match the impedence so as not to blow the amp. If you wire 4 sets of 8Ω speakers in parallel, your load is going to be 2Ω and that's more than likely too low for the amp. It'll burn it up. There are some amps that can go down to 2Ω. Just be careful to check the manuals.

You could wire the speakers series/parallel and that'd give you 8Ω. I'd actually consider using two or four amps depending upon the power of the amps. Usually, these rooms get turned up pretty loud sometimes. Forcing an amp to drive that many speakers can result in a pretty quiet system overall.

You can literally 'Y' connect the inputs of the multiple amps so they all get the same audio signal. Perhaps the more proper way would be to put a high-quality audio distribution amp to split the incoming signal and maintain the impedence integrity.

If your audio switcher has enough outputs, you could also tie 2-4 audio zone outputs together in code and use the switcher as a splitter so-to-speak.

Hopefully this is helpful.
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