House is one level,open floor plan, with walk-out patio.
Here's what I'm hoping to do:

Audio speakers in kitchen/living/dining room/deck (zone 1), speakers in home gym in basement and outdoor patio area (zone 2). I would like to have volume controls for outdoor area, gym and living area if possible, but only one main control for living area and one for lower level.

Video distribution for living room, master bedroom, gym tv, and lower level family room. My dream is to be able to go to any of these areas, turn on the tv and chose to watch a dvd, cable or TIVO, so all this would come from one main media source in the lower level.

At some point we will have a surround sound setup in the family room, but will not purchase that yet.

We have a media closet designated in our house plans and to start with we will probably run the audio wires and possibly the speakers, and for the video runs and the surround system, running smurf tubes for future runs.

Does this sound like a good plan or something that is crazy? We don't need super high end, but since this will hopefully be our first and last build, we don't want to go cheap. We're willing to wait to complete the set up but want to have tubes put in for future installation.

Any help/ideas is greatly appreciated :)

Heather in MN

1. Stay away from BOSE , the most over priced hyped product on the market. For what they cost and the lack of quality you can buy hand built speakers .I'm a big fan of the products from www.av123.com . Beautiful sound , great build quality , super friendly company and very reasonable pricing .

2. Take a look at the Sonos products for multi room sound. it works off the your music you have stored on your computer.You will wonder how you lived without it.

3. Research, research and more reasearch . It's way to easy for the builder and his AV friend to convince you that you need something you don't . Ask lots of questions and don't agree until you get the answer you want.

best of luck to you .
Mike

I’m not sure what a medium price range might be, but this is what we have.

You’re looking at a" whole house" system. We have the media closet that you speak of downstairs.

I have a Matrix system: 20 watts per channel; 8 zones; 4 sources.
I have over 20 ceiling speakers (not recommended for the surround sound room, imo) on 2 floors.

In Canada, the speakers are about $200 each (recently I have replaced 3 of these), so next time I would use a better quality speaker, but the previous owner might have abused them.
We have keypads in the walls of all zones (we’re using 7 of the 8 zones) that select the source material from 1 of the 4 sources that we have access to.
We use 2 satellite receivers (= 2 sources); big screen TV (= 1 source) and we used to have the last source hooked up to a cd juke box (since removed). So we could listen to the TV in any zone, or listen to 1 of the 2 satellite receivers; this works well for us. The forth source is still open for use.

You could use outside speakers in the soffit of your home if you will be sitting close to the house; the deck we have extends out from the house about 15 feet, and the soffit placement is good. The deck is 60 feet along the back of the house and we use 4 speakers.
Note: There are outside speakers that you can place in your garden (some apparently look like rocks), but I have no experience with these.
We can operate the keypads from outside through the windows, but if you can put the keypads outside, sheltered if you can. We have the zone keypad for outside in the kitchen, but when operating the kitchen zone it sometimes turned on the outside zone, and we’re not aware that we have turned this one on.

I would also recommend that you insulate your home (interior walls and floors) to keep other source material from bleeding into other floors/rooms.

I would wire the entire house with coax and cat5 and telephone wire (maybe 3 runs of the cat5). One cat5 for music and 1 run for computer, and an extra just in case (I think that some systems use 2 runs of cat5, but not sure at this time).

Good Idea: Treat the surround sound room separately.

Good luck!