General advice for an 8 Zone system

[nickgosling premium]

nickgosling premium

29. Juni 2021 at 11:33 #51372

Hi,

I’m a massive fan of you guys and I have installed a few max2play kits for friends and family. My newest project is for a friend that wants an 8 zone centrally located system. He’s looked at all the standard big players, russound etc… However I talked about squeezebox and max2play and hes keen. So i’m after ideas and would love to send the business your way.

I’m thinking 4 Pis with a dac each
2 x 8 channel amps
Then I can use multisqueeze to use each pi as a double instance of squeezelite. I’d make sure the DACs go to the more important zones and the 3.5 outputs go to less important ones.
They can control it all with ipeng and Squeezecontrol.

This setup saves on cost and the pain of a rack full of AMP HATS.
Is this a good solution?
My only worry is how to set all the treble and bass. I’m pretty sure that was an issue the last time i did this. I suppose I could use a preamp and do it manually.

I’m open to ideas please.

[MarioM Moderator]

MarioM Moderator

30. Juni 2021 at 15:20 #51374

Hi Nick,

That sounds like a good project and should be feasible. What amps do you have in mind?
Theoretically, you can use an equaliser with every Max2Play device, but that certainly doesn’t come close to the quality of an external preamp.

In any case, with so many players, you should think about using a powerful server. I recommend a Pi 4 with at least 2 GB of RAM, but 4 or 8 would certainly be better. Or you can run the server on a NAS or similar.

[sfraser]

sfraser

5. Oktober 2021 at 0:21 #51702

I have done something similar with a couple of pi’s. I have several old slimdevices SB’s, Radio’s of various vintages and types still in circulation as well as several max2play pi’s running squeezelite. The SB radios are in the bathrooms and home gym, the rest of the squeezebox’s are co-located with the family room stereo and basement home theatre. However in my rear porch and kitchen I have wall mount and ceiling mount speakers and no pratical spot for a stereo system. For those two installations I ran the speaker wire back down to the basement to a 19″ rack. I built two pi’s and installed them in two hifiBerry metal cases with the XLR DAC pro variant HAT’s. They plug directly into separate 2 chan. amps. Of course Max2play is running on all the pi’s , and I use the volume control on the squeezelite S/W via the material skin URL on my phone to control all the players and the volume per player. I often have the porch, family room and kitchen sync’d together but not always. The Crown amps are very powerful , several hundred watts per channel, so I set the gain on the amps to 50%, to help avoid accidents. Everything works very well. I don’t see any issue co-locating all the Pi’s with a 8 channel amp as you mentioned. I did have a pi4 running as the LMS server for a while and it worked great with a 90k track library and 8-10 players. I have since moved the LMS to a jail in a FreeNAS server which also hosts my music library.