IR remote issues

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  • Jeff Hartford
    Member
    • Jul 2003
    • 53

    IR remote issues

    Suspect this is a simple question for the Rotel wizards here. I have the RSP-985 with the "second room" output to run a set of speakers outside the primary listening area. Plan to have my main setup in a basement home theater. Would like to run a set of speakers upstairs in the family room. I would have a separate power amp downstairs than run the speaker wire up (suspect that would be a lot cheaper than running interconnects to the amp upstairs). In my rack will have a Denon 2900 as well as a Denon multiplay CD player I would like to access from upstairs.

    Questions-

    1) Does there need to be a "hard" (wire) connection between the components downstairs and up? In other words (know nothing about this so hope you can figure out what I am trying to say), do the IR remotes travel through the ethereal vapor, or do you have to run coax or something between the receiver/transmitter. What products are needed and seem to work well? I seem to remember someone struggling through this a while back but could not track down the thread.

    2) what kind of speaker wire should be run through the ceiling floor? I am using SoundKing 12G, but suspect some sort of covered/shielded wire would be used to get upstairs. Than I guess could have a plate to plug into with a short run of the 12G.

    3) Can two different sources be run simultaneously with this second room feature? (2900 downstairs, multi play upstairs?)

    Thanks in advance for the info that I am sure will be insightful.

    Jeff
  • Andrew Pratt
    Moderator Emeritus
    • Aug 2000
    • 16507

    #2
    Jeff I've moved your post over to the spaces area as it fits there a little better. If you look back a little here you should find a post I made about my second zone install which is pretty much exactly the same as what you're asking. (look here and here)) There really two ways to do this. One would be to simply by an IR repeater and use it to bounce the signal from one room to another. These work by converting the IR signal from your remote control into an RF signal. RF freq's can travel though walls and floors so it will easily make it to the receiving unit that then converts it back to IR for your gear. These tend to be about $50USD give or take a bit and you should be able to find one at places like Radio Shack. The benefit these have is that there's no setup involved you just place one cone in each room and you're done. The downside is that they're not nearly as reliable as a hard wired system and they can't be used to control the second zone features of the pre amp independantly of the main zone...which means when someone upstairs presses CD the basment unit will switch to CD as well which could interupt the activities occuring in that room. A better albeit slightly more expensive solution is to go for a hard wired solution. These do involve running a wire from the second zone to the receiver so they are more difficult to install but IMO they're worth the effort. Both Erik Farstad and I are using a unit called the Buffalo that we purchased from http://www.smarthome.com. Its a connecting block that you place near your AV gear and then you can plug in some IR blasters which will fire off the IR signals to the devices in your rack. Note that the Rotel's will have a 1/8" IR input plug on the back so you can simply plug a plug dirrectly into the back of the Rotel so you won't need a blaster stuck on the front. You then run a cat5 wire from this connecting block to the second zone where you'll terminate it with some sort of IR receiver. There's a multitude of options here but I used a wall plate unit that seems to work very well for me unless it is in bright sunlight. I posted pictures of my install in the other thread which will likely made some of this more clear and there's some good help on the smarthome site. Speaking of smarthome they're likely the best online company I've ever had to deal with:T

    For speaker wire I'd go with at least 14 guage due to the lenght. I used some in wall approved 12 guage wire for all my speaker cables incl. the second zone since 1) its cheap and 2) I needed to run though the walls and ceiling for many of my speaker cable runs

    For your third question...yes providing you plug the hard wired plug into the zone two input on the back of the rotel. This will then only change the input intended for zone two. Its even smart enough not to power down the unit if either the main or second zone is still active and there should be amp triggers for the second zone. You'll need to run analog cables to connect the gear though as I don't think it can use a digital input for a second zone output.




    Comment

    • Jeff Hartford
      Member
      • Jul 2003
      • 53

      #3
      Andrew- Thanks so much for the info. As I will be running speaker wire up, it is no big deal to run the cat5 with it. I will be using my Rotel 1095 as my main amp and I have a modified Hafler (AVA Audio by Van Alstine Omega amp- heard of it??) as my second zone amp. I will likely only be using the multi CD player in second zone as the Denon 2900 connects to the 985 via a RCA to 25 DB connection. Am not sure can output second zone from that. Thanks again for your always insightful info. Do I need a second remote for the 985? One upstairs for second zone? And also a second remote for the Denon multiplay CD player?

      Jeff

      Comment

      • Andrew Pratt
        Moderator Emeritus
        • Aug 2000
        • 16507

        #4
        If you're using the multichannel connection from the 2900 it should work fine for the zone 2.

        Yes you'll need a second remote for each device unless you want to keep bringing them back and forth...I can recomend a few universals if you're interested.




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