Also went this route so the system could be moved easily if the next buyers didn't want it. I'm an industrial electrician so I'm used to working with terminal blocks and din rail.
I ran 14 awg speaker wire throughout the house. No idea how much the amps are drawing when idle but I can't imagine it's a lot. Most of the audio played is mp3 format through itunes or iphones. I don't know what a "good" usb sound card would do differently.
The amps are maybe turned up to 5 (out of 10) and the sound can get "loud". I used four speakers for the living room and could have done it easily with just two speakers. The house i'm using this system in is a 4000 sq.ft. I don't know what's more important the amp or the speaker but this combination is really working well. I'm not an audiophile so you'll just have to take my work for how things "sound" So you could technically have a 12 Zone Audio system for under $2000. ( Not sure how many zones one PI can handle) I believe you could run this systerm off of one or two Raspberry PI's. Now the computer was around $500 but it also double as a media server running XBMC. Again something that I think will work better running from a Linux system.Įach zone has one amplifier ($25), one sound card ($2), and two speakers ($130). The only problem I've run into is that after a computer restart the USB sound cards take on a new "ID" so the sound card I set in shairport4w may no longer be the right one for that zone. Name the zone and select the appropriate sounds card. Once you get all the instances of Shairport4w going it's pretty simple.
I was only able to get 11 instances of shairport4w but am looking into running everything on a Raspberry Pi which I think will allow for a bit more flexibility. Instead of using a physical Airport Express for each zone I made several instances of Shairport4w on a Windows computer. Powered by a Lepai LP-202a stereo amplifier Īnd to get the audio to each zone I used 12 usb sound cards I have a total of 12 zones so I needed an affordable way to handle that many rooms. I would like to share my AirPlay setup for those who are interested in doing something similar.
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