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Introduction to my A/V Matrix Distribution System

Over the last year I have been building a fairly elaborate Audio/Visual switching system in our home. The original purpose was to allow us to watch Tivo in any room that we might be in without having to use a non-DirecTV Series 2 Tivo . We wanted it to be SIMPLE, one remote, anywhere in the house, and we could watch our Tivo . We decided against wireless since that always shuts down the 802.11, has crappy quality and makes me feel like I should have a tin hat on, that means everything had to go over a physical wire.
As with all things of this nature when your a geek the simple becomes complex pretty rapidly.

• Idea 1.0: “Lets watch Tivo in the office so we can watch Survivor there.”
• Idea 1.5: “Why only watch Tivo in every single room, we should be able to watch ANYTHING in ANY room!”
• Idea 2000++ Service Pack 5: “Lets watch ANY source in 0 or more rooms and control it with an intutive user interface!”

And so was born our A/V Switching system. It consists of the following components.

Infrastructure

The first pre-requisite was structured cabling. At inception we would only be using Composite video and unbalanced audio signals but I knew that within a year or two, when our remodelling was complete, we’d be in a world where we wanted HDTV with component video and digital audio everywhere. Any infrastructure I put in place would have to be ‘future proof’. After poking around a bit I decided to run bundled cable rather then individual strands and I selected bundled Monster cable with 2 RG-6 and 2 Cat5e PER bundle. I also picked up some Cat6 for gigabit ethernet and ran two of those out as well. Each room would get 2 of these bundles.Thats a LOT of cable (4 RG-6, 4 Cat5e and 2 Cat6 PER ROOM) but it really means that this structured wiring is future proof for the most part barring any dramatic changes in technology that may occur. Yes, I could have gone cheaper with Belkin or some other cable but I got a screaming deal on my 1000′ of Monster cable. It also came on two huge spools and thats always fun.

I decided to terminate these wires into a system of Leviton QuickPort jacks. These things are fantastic, there is a QuickPort for everything and the systems modular nature met my requirements for overall system flexibility perfectly. Its a bit pricey but it was worth it to me.

I buy all my Leviton gear and tools at Tri-State Electronics via their webstore. They always deliver exactly what I ordered fairly quickly at super competitive prices. And everything is always in stock.

Switching Control

Now that I had the wiring figured out my attention turned to controlling what went over the wires. After a lot of research(ok, a few Google searches..) and some chats with friends in the A/V business I eventually selected the AutoPatch switching matrix. My friend is a real A/V nut, loves to tune his equipment and used to work in large scale A/V projects (stadiums and Disney World). In his words ‘It was a closed system, I mean it worked well but it was really to simple.’ Music to my ears, I LOVE simple!

Even better, its CHEAP! Yes, you heard me, CHEAP. It turns out that there is a huge aftermarket for this hardware on EBay . A side-effect of simplicity is longevity and this hardware is so simple it really doesn’t break or need maintenance or repair. In fact, when you disassemble it you essentially have a power supply, a simple backplane and plug-in circuit boards that link together. It feels like you took apart a computer from 1978. For under a hundred dollars I received an AutoPatch 1YDM that allows me to switch 4 levels of 8 inputs to 8 outputs.

Initially these were configured using only 3 levels (Composite Video, Left Audio, Right Audio) but are now reconfigured as Component Video and Digital Audio. Thats the great thing about an AutoPatch , a signal is just a signal, it really as no other meaning. The AutoPatch diligently does it job of switching input to output and doesn’t care about what is on the wire.

What does the AutoPatch give us? Well, we can now switch any input to 0 or more outputs and it can have these all switched at the SAME TIME. Its is this simultaneous capability that really distinguishes it from anything else out there at this price point. Lets examine what this really means and run some scenarios.

With this configuration you can do things like map Input 1 to outputs 1,2 and 3 (thus having Tivo on in the Living Room, Family Room and Bedroom at the SAME TIME with no degradation in quality)

Then, while that is happening you can switch Input 3 to the Office and have Input 2 playing Barney on Output 5. All at the same time…..

Thats really amazing when you think about the $100 cost..

Intial control system

To control it all I took 3 pair of wires on one of the Cat5e and allocated it to Infrared traffic (send/receive). These 3 pair terminate in a telco block which then feeds into a Xantech IR repeater/amplifier. The output of this amp feeds back into the telco block for output on the OTHER 3 wires and thus back out to the rooms as required (only one room actually uses this output right now). The result? IR control in every room of the house of any equipment in the garage.

I get all my Xantech gear on Ebay and from Home Tech Solutions. They are ’somewhat local’ (45 minutes) and really have deep knowledge on this stuff. Thanks to them for hammering into my thick skull how IR Distro works!
But thats only part of the solution. Now that I can control the equipment how do I control the switching without running into the garage and pressing buttons on the AutoPatch ? Well, AutoPatch, as a professional A/V concern, has generously solved this problem by providing an RS-232 port and a serial protocol for controlling the switch. Its a simple protocol to, well suited for these sorts of integrations.

My solution was to purchase Girder , install it on my Media PC in the garage (wall racked next to the AutoPatch), plug in a USB-UIRT and teach it to manage the AutoPatch. Girderlistens to the USB-UIRT and when it gets an IR code that it is set-up to recognize it executes a macro. The macro sends the switching command across the serial port to the autopatch. In practice I used my Pronto with old LaserDisc discrete codes from its database that I arbitrarily mapped to my bindings. So, as a simple example I create a screen “Living Room” and on this screen there are buttons for Tivo , DVD and Media PC. When I click the Tivo button on the Living Room screen it sends the IR code for ‘Next Chapter’ on a Pioneer LaserDisc. I trained Girder to recognize this code and map it to a serial command that says ‘Switch living room output to Tivo input.’ (CI1O1T is the serial code if your curious).

NOTE: Insert screen caps of pronto ui here

Result

At the end of this stage what do I have? A system that has moved all of my entertainment sources to the garage. These sources push line level data into an AutoPatch. This AutoPatch is also connected to all of my output locations and controls the switching of input to output with high quality and low cost.

I also get Gigabit ethernet to every room in the house and centralized phone distribution to every room in the house. Once I finish my Component/Digital Audio upgrade I will be using 4 RG-6, 1 Cat6 and 1 Cat5e which leaves 1 Cat6 and 1 Cat5e of spare capacity terminating back to the rack in the garage. Thats 8 pair and good enough to run 8 Component video baluns if I needed to! Serious capacity.

A quick aside

Originally, the system was configured to allow every room to send AND receive A/V sources. This was because the Tivo was hard wired into the living room cabinet and I didn’t want to move it. At the time my Media PC was in the Office and I did not want to move it either. This ability to send and receive from each room was pretty great but once we remodelling I converted all rooms to ‘output’ status and moved everything to the garage for central control. The only room that can ‘input’ still is the Living room because it will have a nifty Pioneer receiver soon that lets my wife plug in her iPod and control it on the TV screen so I’ll need to be inputting line level iPod from there to the rest of the house.

How do we control the Tivo in the garage? I just ran an IR emitter off my IR Distribution telco box (output wires) and mounted it in front of my USB-UIRT and Tivo. Voila, remote control Tivo.

Another aside

I chose to run line level audio everywhere. This is A Good Thing because it means less interference, ground loops, signal loss etc. Its a Bad Thing because each room has to have its own amp for the signal. Not a big deal when plugging into TV sets or tuners but it means that I don’t use those nifty ‘Volume switch in the wall’ sort of setups you see. Thats fine by me, at some point that ‘volume switch in the wall’ stuff will look like those 1970’s era Intercoms that all the hi-tek families installed. Useless and an artifact Thats my view on it at least. Now that I am moving to Digital Audio its irrelevant but suprisingly I have had to defend this position a LOT!

Next Steps

Working to make my control system ‘PC-less’ and truly idiot proof so that my entire system can be sold with the house. Look for future articles on this.