A Beginner’s Easy Guide to Enjoying Whole Home Audio

Everything you need to get the most from your Baton Rouge home’s new whole home audio installation

It’s hard to think of some aspect of your life that isn’t made better with music. Chores, work, parties, holidays, birthdays and other family celebrations all get a little easier and more fun if you have some tunes playing in the background. So why not make it as easy as possible to enjoy your favorite audio content?

The best way to expand and simplify your listening experience is to install a whole home audio system. That way you can enjoy almost any type of audio in any room of your house, no matter the source.

These systems may seem complicated at first glance, but with a few tips up your sleeve you will have no problem navigating the world of whole home audio. That’s why we put together this guide for Baton Rouge homeowners so you can make better decisions for your home. Read on to learn more.

SEE ALSO: HOW TO ENJOY THE ULTIMATE ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE IN YOUR LOUISIANA HOME

THE FUNDAMENTALS

If you want to make it easier to listen to music in your home, the baseline components of a whole-home audio system are easy to acquire. You can link several wireless speakers together and create a DIY audio system that stretches across your home.

The trouble with this approach is you likely won’t be getting the best performance from your devices. Relying on wireless signals causes communication hiccups between devices, and you won’t get the benefits of having your audio system integrated with other devices in your home.

The better option is using higher-quality components that communicate not only with each other, but also other automated devices in your home. Better yet, a professional integrator will install your system for you; they’ll check your wiring, your network capabilities and other factors to determine the best devices for your home and where they should be placed. They will also take care of integrating your audio system with the rest of your home, which can sometimes be a cumbersome process.

HARDWARE

The most important parts of your whole home audio system are your speakers (as you probably guessed) and your receiver. Choosing a receiver is a much simpler task than choosing speakers, though there are important considerations to weigh.

For a whole-home audio system, you’ll want a receiver with a wide range of inputs and sufficient power to run them all. This is particularly true if you want your audio system integrated with your home theater or other A/V devices.

As far as speakers are concerned, you want to be sure of the sound quality, but there are other factors to consider as well. You want to know if your speakers need proprietary software to run properly, and if so, which brands they play nicely with. You’ll also want to look at the speakers’ streaming capabilities; some systems come with services like Spotify or Apple Music built in, while others require third-party components.

Many speakers now allow voice control, but not all of them, so you’ll want to check that as well.

SOFTWARE

What really makes whole home audio tick isn’t the hardware, it’s the software. After all, without the right programming to link your speakers, the only way for everyone to hear music anywhere in the house is to crank up the volume to intolerable levels.

One crucial factor in deciding which components to use is how the devices are linked. Some speakers run over your home’s existing Wi-Fi network, while others form their own mesh network or rely on Bluetooth connections. The best bet here is a mesh network; these devices initially connect over Wi-FI, then form their own subnetwork. That way you get a stronger and more reliable connection than Bluetooth without putting additional strain on your home network.

You also want to see if your speakers can handle multiple audio sources in different rooms or if they can only handle one audio stream at a time. Speakers that rely on Apple AirPlay for streaming from your phone or other device can only handle one audio source. Others allow for streaming over DTS Play-Fi, which works across a wide range of models and allows for multiple sources to play at once.

You now have a handle on the basics of whole home audio. To learn more, call us at (225) 442-9849, fill out our online contact form or click on that chat box in the lower-right corner of your browser.