What is Multi Room Entertainment?

Multi room entertainment is the ability to enjoy any music or source video from any room in the house at the touch of a button. Multi room systems provide a massive improvement to your enjoyment at home as you can now listen to your favourite CD, radio station or DVD in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and dining room whilst carrying out your daily tasks.

While multi room mostly means music and video distribution the very best systems will also give you access to and control over; lighting, internet, security and many other home automation features.

A typical multi room installation would include a home cinema system in the lounge and central CD archive, tuner, DVD player and Sky+ box in a cupboard. This is then distributed to the houses reception rooms, kitchen, bathrooms and main bedroom. Each room would typically have in ceiling speakers, in wall control keypads and a wall mounted LCD screen.

Multi room systems vary massively in terms of the number of rooms and sources they serve and the degree of control of the system from each room in the house. The most basic system will still provide in ceiling speakers in every room and the ability to send four audio and video sources to any room simultaneously. This would give the ability to use a remote control from any room to change channel, skip tracks and change the volume independently in each room.

As you progress to higher quality systems the audio and video quality will become substantially better, as will the control options for the system. Great multi room systems such as Linn and Opus provide in wall control keypads with LCD displays that display the source you are listening to, the radio station you are tuned in to and the ability to skip through tracks and channels from the keypad itself.

When used in conjunction with Hard disk CD archives the keypads will also display all of the information stored on the archive so that you can browse you entire CD collection form any room in the house.

The next level for multi room entertainment would an AMX system which gives you complete control over every aspect of your home. Using AMX’s Modero touch screen panels in the wall of each room or wirelessly, you can browse through your DVD and CD collection, archive your photos and home movies and access the internet. The AMX system will also give you two way feed back on the temperature, security level and light level of every room in the house.