Adding rooms to listed to C4 Tuner

[THEBOZ]

This might be answered somewhere in the forum, if so sorry.

I had a customer today ask me to show him the easiest way to get all rooms to listen to the same station off his C4 tuner, through his touchscreens. I know you can somewhat do this easily with the Digital Audio, is there an easy way to do this with other sources, or is it going to be a programming thing or a nightmare for the customer. Thanks for the help

BOZ

[Samer Shami]

My first thought is to go to the room that is already listening to that radio station. Then via the on-screen (or the touchscreen as you mention) go into "sessions", hit "party" and then select every room.

Anybody else do it differently?

[THEBOZ]

Thanks for the response, but I dont believe you can join a session if you are listening to the Tuner. I know you can if you are listening to the Digital Audio. Anybody else have suggestions.

Thanks

BOZ

[lasvegas_rob]

That poses an interesting scenario: The same would apply if a customer had a CD changer or Cable Box dedicated to solely whole house audio. This then becomes simply an analog audio issue, which was described in class: (Analog sources can be distributed with the matrix switch.) We commonly will include cable boxes for each room, and then another cable box in the equipment location to use with keypads (most commonly with the speakercraft mzc), so that it doesn't disturb anything else being played in the foreground. As I have yet to do this with control4, the equipment needed would be the matrix switch/amp, correct? That would keep it from turning into digital audio at the speaker end. I too, am curious about that, and if I am way off base, someone please let me know. This will definitely come up in future jobs.

[junebug]

TheBOZ,

The C4 tuner is 2 analog sources, if you wired one of the outputs directly to an amp you wont be able to stream that one. It's playing real time. You'll need to change the install method if so.

We place the tuner in an area where there is at least 2 free C4 devices that can accept and stream analog sources. In one case, we placed the tuner in a garage rack that housed an HTC and 2 speakerpoints. That way we could wire the 2 analog outputs of the tuner into a different C4 device. Now we can use both of the tuners anywhere. You could even program a keypad button for party.

I hope I understood the problem correctly. If not we can try again...

[THEBOZ]

Junebug

Kinda, we have set up where the customer has 2 C4 amps and one C4 tuner. Tuner one is to Amp one and Tuner two is to Amp two directly with RCA. The other day we finally got the tuner receiving decent reception and had it playing in the Kitchen, so the customer was exicted and proceeded to ask "Now how do I have other rooms join this station, ie MP3 sessions." I was like well just like the Digital audio, OOPS wait let me check on that. There is no easy way to do this for the customer and in this case 22 rooms of audio it would be a pain in tha %^& to make it work from the Touchscreen. So I created a custom button that says tuner on and one that says tuner off. When he presses this button it turns all rooms to the tuner, rooms he does not want them in he can change no problem. One problem is there are so many zones and we had already installed 2 C4 amps to power all of the rooms, so if he selects Tuner on Tuner one might be on one station and Tuner two might be on another station. Of course we could create a Station custom button, but surely there is an easier way to do this. Thanks for any response, but it applies to any analog source, not just the tuner.

[jamman]

JuneBug, I thought C4 could only stream 1 analog source at a time. I would be interested to know if you can actually have both playing at the same time on the job mentioned.

Jamman

[yellowdog]

I see the problem and have wondered how to do it as well. I have digital audio streaming thruout the house, but analog sources into the control4 switcher and multizone amp have to be selected a room at a time. THere needs to be a way to create party sessions on the control4 matrix switcher like the digital audio sessions. Although someone raised a good point: can you input an analog source directly into an HTC and stream it that way digitally? It would not seem likely that a high enough A/D converter would be added into HTCs to go along with the D/A for output. But maybe. Is that what you all are implying?