Home Theater/Game Room Thread

Multi-Room Audio

In our new build I want to toy with the idea of multi-room audio. Not interested in multi-zone or whatever we used back in the 80s and 90s. At most this will be to wirelessly play Spotify while on the porch, maybe put some music on in the garage workshop, and maybe in the kitchen area. It’ll be 100% streaming based, no analog sources or anything else.

Thinking about rack mounting a couple of WiiM Amps in the network closet and having builder wire out 14 gauge speaker wire to the identified rooms. At least with the speaker wire run and CAT5/6 to all the rooms we would have flexibility for the future.

My office setup would be standalone with my bookshelf KEF or Magneplanar. And living room will be standalone unless we want to get fancy. But with the kids it is Bluey and Paw Patrol and Super Simple. So no need for 12.2.5 Atmos.

Any other alternatives? Don’t want a $10k setup for this. Other priorities with the build.

Went ahead and ordered 2x WiiM Amp and 1x. WiiM Ultra. Going to set up a test at the house and see how I like it before committing to a whole home build.

Also ordered a pair of KEF ci200QR to see how they sound and if we want to use those as ceiling speakers.

The three WiiM units came in. Seem to be pretty easy. Set them up in my office for now and just plugged my right speaker into one and left speaker into another. Spotify just uses my local account.

Got everything off eBay and appears to be mostly very lightly used, if at all. Two of them came up needing firmware updates and no prior network or settings and had original wrapping on the unit. The third came up trying to find an old WiFi network so had to reset it but worked fine. Was about $70 cheaper per device. Speakers haven't even shipped yet though :|

I have a 2RU mount being delivered today for the WiiM so they can fit in an equipment closet. The WiiM Ultra will probably sit on my desk / whatever in the office.



App works really easy. Named devices, can play from there or from Spotify App and pick which speakers. In the WiiM App though I can group devices and play them together. Tested grouping the Back Porch + Living Room for a minute and both speakers came up. Seems super easy for what it is.