Whole home sound system design

Audio Hardware & Software Speakers
1

I’m building out a whole home sound system and getting a bit lost in details/planning. I’m attempting to create a unified yet segmented system, meaning that I can have a central hub that allows the speakers to play throughout the whole house from one location, but also each location has it’s own device that’ll play only from that room.

I presume the best way to accomplish this would be wire the speakers from each room up twice, once from the central hub, and once from the location specific device.

In laymens terms: I want to be able to turn music on from a central hub in the living room and have it play in the whole house; then turn that off and go into the garage and have only the speakers in that location playing from it’s dedicated amplifier.

Additional questions:
Suggestions on quality ceiling speakers?

What type of amp or sound unit would be best for each room? Probably 5 locations total (plus the 1 main location.) Bluetooth is the primary use case; but I also have like record player for instance.

2

Someone once suggested in the internet to use Volumio and Raspberry Pi for that purpose. No need to run expensive high quality audiophile grade wires, just a network cable and 3.5mm jack. Granted, its not audiophile grade enough but its cheap and it should work.

3

“Acceptable” is fine for this purpose, really, since the purpose is noise while doing something and not necessarily just to listen to music. Like cleaning the house, working out, cooking ,etc. I’ll look into that.

4

high cost method = Sonos

low cost method = OpenSound

NOTE: these are ‘smart’ systems and will require netowrk connections. as opposed to ‘just’ 2 receivers and speaker wiring.

there are dual zone receivers still available, with network access, that would do this and only require 1 set of speaker connections also.

5

Sounds a lot like a Client-Server system of sorts: Multiple remotes to tell the Server what to do (or stop doing).
That server would then have to talk to Slaves to make them play (or not play) music/podcasts.

As a “using what exists”-solution: SSH into some PC that then plays audio into a 100V-System amplifier with dedicated wires running to each room. A lot of these amps have multiple zones with some allowing for control via Serial.

An expensive solution would be most of the above, except for DANTE to move the audio to the individual rooms. Required dedicated amplifiers per room though.

Dumb question: Would a Boombox or Bluetooth speaker suffice?