[strags]

I have a Sonos that came with my house. It's actually the least of my worries.

The house was built about 10 years ago with what (I presume) was a state-of-the-art system at the time - an "AudioAccess WHEN" system. It works fine - there are keypads and speakers in every room, and I can pipe audio from the Sonos (or an Airplay receiver) to anywhere.

It's a weird topology, however - the speakers in each room are wired to the keypads (which is where the amps live). Each keypad has a power connection, and some kind of (presumably proprietary) Cat-5 connection to a central hub. The hub in turn is connected via Cat-5 to a head unit with FM receiver, CD/AUX inputs, etc...

When we moved into the house, the head unit wasn't working - it refused to establish a connection to the hub. I managed to track down a working tech support phone number, only to hear that they don't make this system any more, and that the head units often fail in this way. I managed to find what may have been the last replacement head unit in existence on Ebay - bought it, and fortunately everything started working!

I am, however, dreading the day when it inevitably dies. Since the speaker wires go to the keypad amps, and not to the wiring closet (where the hubs live), I'm not sure what I could replace it with - beyond re-running new speaker wire to a completely new system in the wiring closet.

[cr0sh]

If there's cat5 at the keypads back to the central hub, and the speaker wires go to the keypads, then you can just hook the wires from the speakers to the cat5 - choose one or two pair (depending on the distance, you might want to "double up" to lower the impedance over the run), and hook 'em up. Then you just need to figure out a distribution system at the central hub location.

If you find you can run the speakers on a single pair per speaker - that will leave you with 2 other pairs on the cat5 - which you could use for control or communication.

But what I would do before all of that is try to reverse-engineer the protocols or whatnot that the whole system is currently using, so you can keep the keypads/amps and such, and create some kind of custom main "head unit" later.