Advice for multi room setup - CA Incognito 4 zone

basill

We are moving shortly into a new build two storey house. Only flooring down as yet is ply so running cable will be relatively easy. Have a mate who is a spark who is going to help run whatever we need. I thought I had all of our cabling requirements sorted until he asked me about multi room which hadn’t really crossed my mind. That got me thinking and I have spent most of the weekend researching various options and thinking of what our requirements will be.



Don’t want or need a top end system so am leaning towards the CA Incognito 4 zone system which I see Richer Sounds has as a deal on. Hopefully I can screw some more out of them as well by getting cabling, tv’s, brackets, receiver and suchlike as well.

Our basic requirements are:-

• We don’t want any cables on display, want a classy finish. Our mate is shifting all sockets for things like TV to eye level height so we get a nice clean look.

• Our 4 zones will be the lounge, kitchen/diner, master bedroom and study

• Lounge – 50” LG TV with DLNA, will have Sky for sports etc. Want all digi boxes hidden away.

• Kitchen/diner – 42” TV with DLNA for kids (am going to rip all of the kids dvd’s and store on a NAS). TV will probably have freesat or freeview built in but might get a PVR box like the Humax HD. Again digi box hidden away.

• Master bedroom – probably just have speakers and the keypad to listen to music. Not really interested in throwing in a tv at all but might leave some cable in the walls for a rainy day

• Home office – again no tv, but will want audio

• Cat 5 will be run throughout the house to supply each room

• Coax will be run to each TV as well. Speaker wire run for each room

• All of the cat 5 ethernet cabling will come back to a netgear switch with a NAS attached

• We would like to listen to internet radio and play music from playlists. All of our music is in mp3 format on our pc and I have spent what feels like a lifetime using music brainz and various other applications ensuring that the ID tags and album art are 100%. Presently I have an existing wireless streamer (TEAC WAP-8500) which I was planning on using in the system that grabs the music from the pc and plays it through my ancient Denon mini system.

• Not into gaming so no x-boxes or the like so no need to worry about that.

So my questions are………

• Even with two storeys space is reasonably tight. There is a small area below the stairs in the main hallway where some kit could go. But I don’t want to cook anything so I was thinking that things like sky boxes and the netgear switch can all go into the loft space

• Would you put the CA Incognito Audio and Video hubs into the loft??

• Then presumably the AV receiver, CD and DVD player would be better suited under the stairs where they are more accessible??

• How does the Incognito cope with Sky? Will the video hub play Sky in each room where we have TV’s?

• I see that Richer are doing monitor speakers rather than the Incognito ones. The advantage of the Incognito ones were the inclusion of IR receivers. I assume that the keypads (KP 10) have IR receivers on them so presumably that would mean siting the keypad over beside the TV’s to avoid having to direct a remote control potentially behind you.

• How will you get all of our music and playlists to play from the NAS in a multi room set up?

Hopefully you can help fill the gaps in my knowledge. Once forearmed I am planning a trip up to chat to the guys at Richer and will be better informed if I can get my head around the above. Thanks for your help.