PC amp and controls question from newbie

[Gregw]

Building a new house and want to integrate my computer into a sound system. All my music is on my computer and I want to be able to play and control that music from my central computer. (wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room, kitchen and on the porch, screens in all those places too) I know I can take the signal from the PC to DAC to amp to switching box to different sets of speakers. But I want to control all of that off the computer screen, different volume to different sets of speakers etc. How is this done? Can this be done? Thanks

 

[darascal]

I'm doing basically what you're doing, but I'm using a Mac + iTunes, so I'm not sure how much of this will apply - I assume you are using Windows, since you said "PC".

 

I have one computer (Mac Mini running headless, ie no keyboard or mouse) in the living room. Amp/dac/speakers in the living room, amp/dac/speakers in the bedroom, powered speakers in the kitchen. The Mini is hard-wired via USB into the Dac. In each of the other two rooms I have an Airport Express, which has both digital and analog output of the iTunes stream, via wireless network. The digital out in the Express in my bedroom feeds the dac, the analog out in the Express in the kitchen feeds the powered speakers.

 

Each room has its own volume control (on amp or speakers in kitchen). (You can also control volume for each room via iTunes, but this may degrade sound quality.) I control iTunes via the Remote iPhone app, or use my laptop to do Screen Sharing to control iTunes and the entire desktop.

 

This is just one solution for this & is pretty commonly used. I'm sure there are others here who can offer other (and perhaps less expensive?) solutions. Another solution is using SqueezeBox - there are many on this board who can speak to that, but the concept is similar to the Airport Express approach.

 

In my experience, using a single amp to power multiple sets of speakers had a significant degradation in sound quality when more than one set of speakers was playing at once. But perhaps there are some amps that can handle this.

 

Rascal