New house: in ceiling installation questions

pyrocyborg

Hi!

We're building a secondary home for my parents and well, right now, I am tasked with the home audio part and I have a few limitations.

Considering that the rest of my family do not want any speaker hanging on the walls or on the floor (be it because of WAF or because there are young children who would break them anyway), I'm stuck with in ceiling speakers as the only option. That being said, as this system mainly is for background music purposes, it doesn't seem like a bad idea so in ceiling speakers should do just fine.

We're going to have two zones : one inside for the kitchen, the dining room and the living room (a relatively large L shaped 622 sq ft open area with 9 feet high ceilings) and one outside (a 200 sq ft veranda).

So here are my questions (and you will see that I am a bit overwhelmed) :

1) Now, I might be wrong, but I guess it will take at the very least 4 speakers to cover the "inside" zone at an adequate level, right?

2) As we're not going to listen critically to music with this setup, are we better off with a couple of stereo speakers instead of both left and right speakers?

3) Can we use a single in ceiling stereo speaker to cover the same area than two standard speakers or would we require the same exact number (e.g. 4 stereo speakers to cover the 622 sq ft area)?

4) We would like the convenience of wall mount volume knobs for both the inside area and the outside one: is it hard to set one up if we want the inside one to control two or more sets of speakers at the same time?

Thanks for your help!

leftwinger57

This is pretty old but here goes. My primary job was as an alarm installer both burglar and fire systems. Remember this was the 80s when the housing boom and condo mania hit big. Now my boss decides he wants to be a Bose distributor. Bose had their family room Lifestyle #30 and #50 systems and were fine for H/T family room use. They also made 3 room amplifiers that looked like car amps not to be seen but hung in basements or closets and iirc can have 3 rooms and a sub connected to this. We mainly used their high hat style of speakers, their volume controls and all had to be home runned back to the amp. There were input plates that also used Bose 8 wire w/ a ground wire in it. The high hats came in 2 types 1 you had to use ONLY Bose gear and the other was and they looked the same you could hook-up to any amp/receiver you wanted. If the areas are separated then 2 sets of hi-hats would be needed and also volume controls should be in the equation. I'm not sure if Bose even makes these things any more but we did install them for back ground music and it was not audiophile anything.
as for your #4 speakers go to the volume controls then a run to the amp if not using all Bose gear. I could not find what the amp looks like but they still make hi-hat speakers that are very different than the ones I used. Here's a tutorial on cutting out for ceiling speakers. Looks like it was pre-wired and put in boxes may be for code ,we did not. We had Bose made templates for pre-wire applications and also half moon jobs for non prewired houses that had set springs to pull the speakers up and hold them tight fit after your hole was cut hopefully not bigger than the speaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT0T3Ke-7eo