Multiroom with plural sources

I hate to belabour this but I wanted to clarify some points as I too have a whole house system I would like to set up.

My situation: Whole house is wired for approx 10 zones speakers in wall/ceiling, home run to basement central area.

I am considering Airport Express with a Dayton Audio MA1240a Multi-Zone 12 Channel Amplifier or something like that.

I would have 1 Airport Express per zone.

I have 1 mac Mini that would be a media server, as well I have a DNS 323 NAS that has a itunes media server option. My Apple Remote App sees both libraries.

I currently use airport extreme with mac mini so I cant really test everything out yet.

But I want the following

each zone: Airport Express + Amp (MA1240a or equivallent), speaker wire and pair of speakers.

It sounds like from the previous posts I cannot play from one iTunes library to multiple locations as separate streams, ie different music to each zone.

If I used an Apple TV instead of Airport Extreme, would that change things?

Also, since Airport Express is Airplay compliant, each iphone, itouch or ipad can stream whatever source they have on their device directly to their zone. Most likely, (4 kids in the house) they would have all the media or streaming services on their ipad that they would want to hear anyway.

Any additional thoughts on this?

Hi coxwain,

I advise to start a new thread with your question: this one is marked as solved, and there will be more help in a new thread.

Lex

Hi,

check out the app WHAALE Multiroom Player for iPad.

With that you are able to stream a song to multiple speakers or stream different songs to different speakers.

Without any additional hardware - just iPad, AirPlay speakers (and your wlan-router ...).

Maybe - if you want - you are able to mix sound effects (wind, sea waves, etc.) with your music.

For me, it's all what i want/need 😎

It is the answer for the question "Real Multirooming with AirPlay speakers..."

Where do you buy those speakers? Them seem to look like they will work.

Since I have a wired house without source equipment, I think the best solution is to wait for a full blown airplay amp to come out. And use wired speakers.

Hi coxwain,

there a lot of airplay featured amps on the market now, e.g. http://airplayspeakers.com/pioneer-vsx-series-av-receivers-for-2012/#.Ugt8EGRgZf Q

but personally i like the smart and tiny, active speakers with "integrated airplay". Only i have to plug them in the electrical socket - and no more cables are necessary.

there are a wide range (particular in price) of them.

Good price/quality is (for my opinion) SONY: http://www.sony.de/product/wireless-lautsprecher

I use them in the "secondary" rooms like floor, bathroom, kitchen, etc.

In the livingroom i have a (more expensive, but more briliant sound) bowers&wilkins like http://www.bowers-wilkins.de/Wireless-Music-Systems/Wireless-Music-Systems/Wirel ess-Music-Systems/airplay.html

Since the WHAALE App for iPad is there i have a very comfortable and intuitive multirooming solution.

I have 5 Airport Express devices in my home network. I'll share what I have learned

A computer running itunes (Mac or PC) can adress all or some of the airport express connected speakers. Itunes can only play one song at a time.

Any speaker not in use by a device can be used by another device (another MAC/PC, an idevice such as an ipad or iphone).

However, If a Mac/PC is streaming itunes to a subset of speakers it can also stream, say, Pandora at the same time to unused speakers

My family will regularly run multiple instances of itunes on separate computers (I'm not sure how you would run mulitple itunes instances on one computer). Each of us claims the speakers we want

Your limit on Airport express devices depends on ethernet vs. wifi. With ethernet you can essentially run an unlimited number of AX devices (4 of our 5 are ethernet). With wifi you are limited to 3-5 AX devices depenidng on wifi signal strength

Carlos

Those are all great options. But what I am looking for, and this would be helpful for people who have legacy whole house systems or want a wired system.

I want a multi room amp like a russound that runs completly off of airplay. All speaker zones would be wired into the multiroom amp.

something like this:http://russound.com/product_detail.php?i=1550

it would be great if it had the capacity to multi source and multi zone too, but all run through airplay.

I dont want to have wall controllers or remotes. Everyone (6 people) have apple devices in our house that could control the device so I see no need for a remote anymore.