Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Need Sum advice

The first question, I think, is whether he is going to want to listen to music around the house at the same time someone is watching movies in the Home Theater. If so, then your friend has two choices :

1. Get a high end receiver for the Home Theater which as "zone 2" support, allowing him to feed 5 channels of audio to the home theater and another 2 channels to "somewhere else". Generally this is unsatisfying because many people want to use all 7 channels for the home theater ("7.1") and so there are no channels left for zone 2.

2. Use a different source (maybe a cheap used receiver plus CD changer) for the music in the house. In this case the second source could be located anywhere and would probably NOT be in the home theater. It's way more convenient to put the music source somewhere close to where you will normally be in the house, eg. living room area.

The next big question is whether your buddy is looking for real high quality music around the house or just "decent" music. The tradeoff is like this -- you can get special speakers designed for placing around the house, which typically have transformers mounted on them which allow you to connect a whole bunch of speakers without overloading your receiver/amplifier. If you want really good sound (ie decent music speakers) they will typically be 8 ohm impedence and connecting a lot of them will either require a special "many channel" amplifier or some "not highly recommended" series-parallel wiring.

Bottom line is (a) so-so speakers, (b) only a small number of speakers, (c) additional amplifier to drive a whole bunch of good speakers.

How many different rooms are we talking about, and is your friend wiring for stereo in each room ?