TV in kitchen - regs?

[The Natural Philosopher]

TBH, this is where Id be thinking of running '100V line' kit round the house....

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I did this with audio many many years ago. I have 5 analogue stereo circuits running round the house. One carries the audio from the main sound system in the lounge. The other four have radio tuners - preset to those I listen to.

The TV in the kitchen has an HDMI feed from the PVR in the lounge - but I usually have the sound via the analogue system.

The big snag when you go to any form of digital for audio is differing delays. Very annoying if you can hear two at once.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Think I paid £130 for mine.

Yup. Still there at Curries

Smashing little kitchen set.

I remember when a 19" B & W TV with UHF was the bees knees...

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1. I have a shelf nearby...

[Bert Coules]

Thanks for that but these concerns have been answered by others, I think.

Bert

[Jim White]

[snip]

Please !

[spuorgelgoog]

That is what I did (I had some spare wiring from a former underfloor heating installation).

Doesn't provide channel changing though. I suppose it might be possible to extend the 'up' and 'down' buttons on the DAB radio round the house too.

Owain

[Bert Coules]

That does seem to be a stumbling point. If I put a DAB tuner with its own amp in a central location, and then find a way to feed the output of the amp to four or five different rooms (if such a way exists) then I would need control over the tuner (up/down through preset channels) and the amp (volume only) from each room. I don't know if that can be done.

Bert

[Dave Plowman (News)]

100v line isn't ideal these days. Not where you want a semblance of quality.

It dates from the days when amplifiers were very expensive and sound quality didn't much matter. It tends to be reserved for public address systems these days.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

How many radio channels do you regularly listen to? I came up with 4 here. And FreeView tuners are cheap as chips. I still have tuners on the main system I can select to anything I want.

[Bert Coules]

That's a very good point. Certainly no more than three or four regularly.

Are you suggesting one Freeview tuner for each radio station? It would be necessary to split (and perhaps amplify) the incoming aerial signal, but I imagine that could be done.

I could feed each tuner to a different input on a central amp, then the individual room controls would only need to work on the amp in order to change both channel (ie input) and volume.

It's slightly messy and rather depends on the control system, but it would surely work. Thanks.

Bert

[The Natural Philosopher]

Problem is: mine is already built. Need someone with an old XP style machine to do it so that every step is documented

[John Rumm]

no.

Probably - so long as its in a location where its not going to get splashed all the time it should be fine.

Not that I can think of.

[John Rumm]

I would suggest the easiest way is with an off the shelf NAS box (essentially its a small Linux box all ready to go and setup for file sharing). Most have DLNA support as standard these days.

CDs are easy - get a copy of Exact Audio Copy (any number of other similar progs out there - many of them free). That will rip music CDs to files, and the better ones will also look up all the track names for you online so you get sensible names etc.

For DVDs get a copy of Handbrake. That will rip DVDs to a single mk4 file.

(you will need a copy of AnyDVD to make the whole process easy - especially if you want to rip blueray discs)

Anything on analogue media is a tad more tedious! You will need to digitise each in turn, and possibly have the occasional other hoop to jump through for copy protected VHS recordings.

There are plenty of Raspberry Pi based streamer projects that can do this kind of stuff. (although you may want an add on sound card for it to get the best hifi from it - the default PWM audio is "ok" but not stunning)

[Bert Coules]

Thanks. It would certainly free a good deal of shelf space and I can see the convenience, but I'm still slightly dubious about the long-term reliability of hard drives.

Alas that's quite impossible with my collection, virtually none of which consists of commercial recordings. But as I said, I would like to do this, as and when time permits.

For simplicity, I rather like Dave Plowman's idea of using several tuners, each permanently set to a particular channel. If all are connected to a single amp, then the individual room remotes only need to be able to control the amp in order to change both channel and volume.

Bert

[John Rumm]

Would you be happy to use a smart phone or tablet to do the controlling?

For an out of the box solution you could look at the Sonos speakers. They do a very good job of keeping in sync while streaming to multiple speakers over a mixture of ethernet and wifi.

[John Rumm]

Or cheat and download the tape albums you have...

[Bert Coules]

Thanks for this, and the DVD-ripping advice.

I'll investigate that, thanks again.

Bert

[Bert Coules]

Only if I could have one permanently kept in each room. But if I were to do that, could I use them as (very) remote controls? How would that work?

Software permitting, perhaps I could have the input selection options displayed as "Radio channel 1, 2, 3..." and so on (only with the actual names) rather than "Amp input 1, 2, 3...") I should like that.

Bert

[Bert Coules]

Dave,

I've just seen a possible drawback to the multiple-tuners approach.

Given this setup: tuners --> amp -> speaker distribution hub --> separate rooms

then using individual remotes to switch between tuners (and therefore radio channels) would work, but I wouldn't have individual-room control over the volume: the output would be audible in every location simultaneously. That's not really ideal.

Bert