Gutted house = Whole house in-wall speakers

Just in case anybody stumbles upon this, the house is now wired with cat6 and speaker cable to six zones (three stereo pairs, one pair of mono channels, and one mono bathroom).

I used in-ceiling passive speakers, RSL, Polk, and Micca (different ones depending on the use case).

As I’m sure I wrote somewhere, I cannot justify spending $700 a pop on Sonos Amps, and on further thought I decided not to cannibalize a fleet of Ikea Symfonisks.

I posted somewhere else, but I found a little company called Arylic that specifically makes hobby streaming boards. They are quite cost-effective, so I highly recommend combining their preamp boards with a dedicated amplifier rather than using their combined preamp/amplified boards. Either way, they have an API that appears to be updated frequently, and a decent forum for anybody interested.

All in, $150 per two channel zone with a lot of flexibility.

Preamp:
https://a.co/d/hAwaaln
I use these amps:
https://a.co/d/bcfVdLL

To be clear, I will call myself out and state I am alerting people to this company Shirley so that somebody who is not me can write a plug-in!

Time to put a six zone system in a two unit rackmount:

The finished monstrosity: https://youtube.com/shorts/fEP-ipORsxM?feature=share