Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

We use the libratone Zipp for multi room sound. The wifi side of them works reliably and you can take them in the garden and make stereo pairs or basically move them wherever on battery power. In my experience poorly situated stereo pairs of small speakers are useless especially when they have so little low end that digital music ends up being unpleasant to listen to.

I do have some high end speaker systems in different places for critical listening and the libratones are not the only solution I've tried for more general household stuff but we started with 1 and now have 3 because they work well.

The issue I have with anything wireless is that we are in an old stone farmhouse with walls up to 60cm thick in places, so signal doesn't even go from one side of the house to the other, hence pretty much everything being hardwired where possible. The exception being all the nest stuff that can't be hard-wired, but will be placed right next to the wireless APs so should have no issues.

Do need to look into some portable speakers, preferably ones that are cast enabled.

Ouch. that starts adding up...

tempted to just throw out £30 rubbish ones to start with and upgrade room by room

Wouldn't it be better to spend £3k on a separates system you can really enjoy listening to rather than having poor quality audio in every room in the house? Or spend £2k and the rest on records.

I am by no means an audiophile, the majority of music used will be digital content or radio, so not sure we would see the benefit of good separates, and this could always be added on at a later date anyway.
For now it is all about getting the right cabling in place so that we can build a flexible system that means we can change it other time as we see how we use the house.

I am by no means an audiophile, the majority of music used will be digital content or radio, so not sure we would see the benefit of good separates, and this could always be added on at a later date anyway.

In that case I would use portable streaming devices with a wifi access point in each room, rather than running speaker cable to the loft. The Cat-6 cabling is the most important thing.

Cat 6 is not an issue, we have that everywhere.

I looked into portable streaming but didn't really like the idea of being locked into a system, I like the flexibility of the chromecast approach.

Oh a And loft is the master bedroom so it's not like it won't all be easy to access.

i bought a portable chromecast enabled speaker for this reason.

Oh a And loft is the master bedroom so it's not like it won't all be easy to access.

What is the source of the music going to be? A NAS or streamed directly from your phone? Or Spotify?

A bunch of Sonos play 1s, at £3.2k for 16 of them, would do the job. But if WiFi reliability is an issue...

Having said that, with that many you'd get a great sonos mesh network going.

Sound quality would be great and loads of flexibility with repositioning.

All of the above! I have a NAS drive connected to a plex server which serves out all my own content, then have google music and spotify. Also like the idea of allowing any guests we have to be able to stream music to whatever room they are staying in ( I have lots of siblings, there is normally a different one here every night! like a bloody hotel...)

Yeah I did look at Sonos but for some reason I just couldn't being myself to use them.

I quite like the idea of finding lots of old but good quality speakers and using them, which I guess is the beauty of the chromecasts.

All of the above! I have a NAS drive connected to a plex server which serves out all my own content, then have google music and spotify. Also like the idea of allowing any guests we have to be able to stream music to whatever room they are staying in ( I have lots of siblings, there is normally a different one here every night! like a bloody hotel...)

Similar to my setup, although I only use one Chromecast Audio hooked up to my separates system. To be honest I don't find the Chromecast very reliable, even via an Ethernet cable. The initial connection from whichever app you are using is pretty flaky, particularly with Spotify.

Regarding the Sky setup, are you going to use mini boxes for all your TVs? I don't think they do 4K do they?

Good question on the 4k, currently none of my TVs are 4k so not that worried by it yet.

Will have the master box driving the lounge
1 x mini box will drive my bedroom
1 x mini box will get split into 4 signals and sent to the three other bedrooms and the kitchen, so they will all be forced to watch the same channel, but even if I got another couple of mini boxes you can only use 2 at once so the others would be left with nothing, so this feels like the best compromise.

yep - 3k on a load of bedroom setups seems mad to me.

me? i'd spend a grand on a used croft integrated and 1K on some harbeth p3esr and you will have one amazing set up and a bunch of cash left over to have the secondary set up in the parts of the house where it doesn't matter as much...

Reliability would be my worry too.

My Sonos setup is more reliable than the Chromecast audio I have that feeds into it. Both are a bit flaky.

This is in a house with three WAPs giving rock solid coverage.

When Sonos is configured correctly, which takes a while and some undocumented fiddling, it gives me reliability of about 97% over interactions (one out thirty times I ask it to do something it annoys me, per "listening session".) The Chromecast is more like 85% which is way too low.

I think that in a smaller house with a single WAP and a basic network topology that might be better. But that isn't your situation, I think?

Also, Sonos have awesome customer service and will work with you to get it sorted. Chromecast?

I still wouldn't go hardwired and high up on brackets. You'll likely end up with issues driving the length of cable you're going to need (increased resistance). Class D amps still generate considerable heat which can kill them over time, lots of them are sensitive to power supply spikes and there's a reason most manufacturers are using dsp with them as they drive speakers in a different way to class A A/B. Speakers high on brackets normally give terrible room response problems regarding reverb.

It does sound like you're not to worried about critical listening though so if your aim is to fill the house with bright, unresolved, reverb laden digital sound then you're headed in the right direction.

airhead - do you still want to check out this phono stage?

Reliability would be my worry too.

Yes, definitely don't underestimate how fiddly a lot of this hi-tech stuff is to use (your guests will probably give up). But then I'm oldschool, would much rather put a record or CD on and sit back and enjoy it than prat about with my phone for ten minutes.

No house is pretty big, about 250m2.

To be honest at the moment all I will have in place is the speaker points in each room with cable all terminating into the tech room, and it will probably end up taking a while for me to get any setup working at all. I'm worried about using anything wireless due to the thick walls and the fact there will already be quite a lot of wireless devices already (nests, doorbell, phones, tablets etc.) so the more I can get things hard wired the better.

The reason to send everything up to the tech room is that it is an old stone farmhouse so the aim is to keep the visual side of the tech to a minimum, hence no sky boxes in any rooms, all TVs wall mounted and hidden away etc. (TV in the master bedroom is hidden in a recess in the ceiling and comes down on a remote control!)

I quite like the idea of picking up old but decent speakers from charity shops etc as they will at least look more in keeping with the rest of house. its either that or trying to get as small as possible in white so that are not too in your face.

Indeed.

One day I'll learn that "How I imagine it will work" > "How it should work" >>>>> "How it usually works" >>>>>>>>>>> "How it sometimes works".

Ah see that is where we differ, I just love fiddling for ten minutes to try and get one song to work... more enjoyment from that than from actually listening to a song...

It had been on my mind but I've ended up with a slightly different setup at the moment and I'm running the cnc diy phono stage into a digital rig with 2 hypex amps and PMC LB1's or Dynaudio air 20's through a Lavry AD which has a tube saturation feature with a MOTU 8D for digital mixing/dsp. All to get around a +4db bass problem with the speaker positions!

I also just got a PMC Sub 1 to go with my TwoTwo 5's on my desk setup and that's forced me to rethink the other rig a bit. So I'm basically still interested but super busy on both rigs too.

PMC LB1 - now there is a proper set of speakers. Big old TL stand-mount

cool, no worries. I think I am going to have a play with dsp. I just don't know what I am doing!

my big tannoys sound better out from the walls, but practically they need to be either side of the alcoves. I want to see it correction can get rid of some of the bass bloom.