The Quarky Engineer

Anyone have an opinions/experience with any particular multi-room audio controllers (with or without amplifiers)?

I have mapped out speaker locations in our new house, and it looks like I will have a total of 20 zones (40 speakers), give or take a few. Routing all of the speaker wires to a central location is easy, and I would like to have in-room source and volume control (but not passive).

For example the Russound CA66 is a 6 zone controller that supports inroom keypads (over CAT5) and handles source selection. You can bridge them together to get more zones.

The MCA-88X is a better alternative, as it does 8 zones, and also has much better API support , plus better direct streaming support. The downside is the CA66 can be purchased directly, while the MCA-88X is a ‘certified installer only’. I don’t mind purchasing the gear from someone, but I really don’t want them configiuring the gear, and I highly doubt that would be able to do the things I want to do. ( Aside from the standard music stuff, I want to integrate it with my security setup, as well as the home automation system ).

(For example: https://www.russound.com/products/audio-systems/multi-room-controllers/mca-series-controllers/mca-88-8-source-8-zone-controller-amplifier#overview )

Progress – Thanks to Eric Rosenberry for his tree cutting expertise…. Forms and rebar incoming.

A few new toothpicks..

It is interesting to see the correlation between the outdoor air quality ( measured in downtown Portland , in RED), vs the PM2.5 as measured by my in house monitor ( BLUE ).

Both periods are the same ( the month of August ). The measurements are the same unit, so the inside air quality is much better than outside air, but as the outside quality really gets worse it propagates inside.

It is not uncommon to see time-lapse construction videos, and they offer a really cool view of a house being built. I wanted to extend on that a little and do a time-lapse rotating drone footage video of my house construction.

The Mavic Pro drones have a waypoint mode that allows you can program a flight path and camera direction, and I used that mode to record a flight path panning around the build site. I have done three videos of that flight path so far, and here is a merged video of those three.

I’ll do this same flight path every day, then once the house is done I should be able to build a single video that shows the house being build while also panning around the site from the air.

At least that is the theory.

Dirt.