Whole Home Audio best practices...

[TundraSonic]

2 hours ago, ejn1 said:

one thing not mentioned yet...  If not mistaken, in general analog attenuation preserves sound quality better than digital...  When reducing volume via a digital volume control, some sort of bit reduction takes place thus flattening the sound.   The greater the volume reduction, the more the quality degrades.   Maybe not as big of a deal with cheap in ceiling speakers but the more you spend, the more it may come into your thought process.

In theory I don't think so but in reality seemingly yes. In mastering stuff for CD's we'd frequently get weird distortion kinds of stuff. There was no technical rationale for it that we or others knew of but everyone seemed to have problems with it. Analog was simply infinite quality (we use to think it funny that people would buy expensive RCA cables for their home as what they were listening to had likely already traversed tens or hundreds of feet of cheap cables from Radio Shack in studios.)

[ejn1]

11 minutes ago, TundraSonic said:

In theory I don't think so but in reality seemingly yes. In mastering stuff for CD's we'd frequently get weird distortion kinds of stuff. There was no technical rationale for it that we or others knew of but everyone seemed to have problems with it. Analog was simply infinite quality (we use to think it funny that people would buy expensive RCA cables for their home as what they were listening to had likely already traversed tens or hundreds of feet of cheap cables from Radio Shack in studios.)

Good simple article of it below if you're bored

https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/13095789-volume-control-technologies

[Cyknight]

13 hours ago, ejn1 said:

So how are you doing it?  Keypad volume control in each room?

Keypad, touchpad, voice control.....