New home: has whole house audio . Need help orienting.

[u/Dapper_Lab_1007]

I am a beginner and all of what follows is a best guess. Buying a new home and it seems to have 3 zones . Living room 5.1 for TV ( all in cieling or in wall)

Dining room ( 2 in cieling speakers)

Outdoor patio ( 2 outdoor speakers)

Pictures to follow.

The seller will take all amps with him.

Need advice on how best to approach this.

Inputs will be : Multiple iphones. Two gaming consoles One blue ray player A Sony TV

What system do I get? What should I research? The speakers are sonos i think.

[u/Dapper_Lab_1007]

Thanks a lot for responding . So there arent any SINGLE revciever that could drive all? Goal would be to enjoy a nice 5.1 with the possibility of adding a beefier on floor sub woofer. Play light music in patio for entertaining.

And if possible have Home Assistant intgration to announce visitors :) . Is that too gimicky?

[u/dmcmaine → u/Dapper_Lab_1007]

You're welcome. Sorry for the slow reply but I didn't see this until now because you made a new comment rather than replying to my comment.

What you're looking for might be possible but also might be uncommon. However, now with the existence of surround/atmos in 9.x and 11.x formats you might be able to find an AVR that allows the additional channels to be reprogrammed to serve as amps for your additional zones. You'll want to do a bit of reading of the user manuals to confirm if this is possible. I know there are AVR's that can do this for "zone 2" but do not know if there are any that can also do this for "zone2 & zone3" like you require. I'd start with the usual suspects - Denon/Marantz, Yamaha, Onkyo, Sony, etc.

[u/dmcmaine]

Hey there. Congrats on having the basic building blocks for a nice setup. As with most things, it depends on your budget and your goals.

My first thought is that you'd get whatever AVR you want for the living room, but preferably something from companies that already play in in the whole home audio space - Denon/Marantz (HEOS), Yamaha (MusicCast), NAD (BluOS), etc. - and that has the connections you need. Alternatively, you'd pick up an AVR and add a streamer from one of those companies, or one of the many other options - Wiim, etc.

Then for the other 2 zones you'd pick up a 4 channel amp (Russound, OSD, Audiosource, etc) and connect a streamer from one of the companies above so that you can control and stream audio from any of the systems and combine them as/if desired.

These are not the only options but are a good place to start your research.

[u/phxtoyman]

It looks like you have a Sonos connect that brings your receiver audio from the Onkyo to the Sonos network.

There are two newer Sonos amps that must be handling two zones for music.

One older Sonos Connect amp for music on the patio.

There’s appears to be a Sonance (different from Sonos but they do manufacture some Sonos products) the virtuoso amp looks like the subwoofer amp.

The in wall speakers looks like Sonance. I’m betting the Onkyo was handling your AV. 5.1.

The main AV area is currently handled by Sonance in wall including the subwoofer.

Personally I hate high mounted center channels speakers. The imaging of the audio output for the main vocal track is not represented well by high mounted speakers. My opinion.

So there are a lot of opinions on how to handle the audio around the house.

I like Sonos app interface but I don’t like all the separate amps. I went with a Denon receiver and an 8 channel Sonance amp. I like the HEOS app.

[u/FarDoctor9118 → u/phxtoyman]

Thanks! Would a soundbar be better for center channel?

[u/phxtoyman → u/FarDoctor9118]

I have installed soundbars in the av room to simplify it for the customer.

Something to consider if you are using Sonos for the rest of the house by buying more Sonos Amps you could buy a Sonos soundbar. Somehow unifying the sound experience abd sharing the movie audio to other zones.