Multi-Room Audio & Video
For the distribution of sound or video to a number of areas in a building (from one room to over 100), we design networks to allow simultaneous multiple access to multiple sources of music and video throughout the house. How would you like the ability to listen to your favourite CD in your Study, while your husband or wife listens to his/her favourite whilst relaxing in a bath and while your children listen to theirs in their bedrooms, all simultaneously around the house and without the need to leave the room to select a disc from a library of hundreds? How many times have you been sitting in the kitchen listening to a song echoing through from the drawing room and wished for sound with a little more meaning and wanting to change the track but feeling compelled to listen to all songs on the disc because you couldn’t be bothered to walk through the house to the stereo cupboard? And how many times might you have been watching the news in the Drawing Room only to have Trevor McDonald replaced by Tom & Jerry to satisfy the desires of your 6-year-old as he remotely changes the channel on the Sky Decoder? If you are dreaming of the first scenario and yet burdened by the second two, then maybe it is time to consider a more contemporary method of controlling movies, music and television around your house!
It has now been more than a decade since it was necessary to huddle around the record player and argue over who listened to what. The modern approach is to equip a house with one centralised rack of equipment and provide access to this ‘house’ system either from portable handsets or from dedicated control ‘Keypads’ in each room. These ‘virtual Hifis’ make having to buy a separate stack of equipment for each room a thing of the past. And no longer do you have to buy three copies of the same CD to play a song throughout three rooms for a party; it can now be seamlessly piped to as many different parts of the house as you like. Several people can even play multiple tracks from the same CD in a number of rooms without any interruption to the neighbouring room’s enjoyment.
Another age-old complaint surrounding stereo systems has been the space occupied by traditional speakers and the manner in which they can detract from a carefully chosen feature within a room such as a fireplace or work of art. By hiding them in ceilings or walls or disguising them in radiator cabinets and even as rocks in the garden, speakers can be virtually invisible. Alternatively, accept what they are and turn the speaker itself into a piece of art: speakers can be disguised as pictures hanging on walls, a far cry from the boxy black behemoths of yesteryear! It is worth noting that the primary purpose of all Custom Electronic Installation specialists is to specify design-driven equipment to minimise the amount of space required outside of the main equipment hub and maximise the ease with which the entire infrastructure can be integrated into the fabric of the building. To this end, it is essential that ideas and desires for ANY specialist electronic systems are brought to the fore early during the design stage and NOT the day after the plasterer, or worse still painter, has left the building! From Internet and Digital Radio to CDs playing in every room; Sky movies piped from loft to basement cinema or pictures designed to sing on the wall; there are now many different ways to bring your house to life and avoid the age-old question of who comes first; Parent or Child?
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