New Setup Lets Owners Jam to 2TBs of Tunes
By Lisa Montgomery
Homeowners chose only the most important electronics, and left their upgrade options wide open.

t’s easy to get carried away when you’re a tech enthusiast like the owner of this 6,000-square-foot house in Deerfield, Ill. “The sky really is the limit,” he says of his home electronics research. The options galore didn’t sway him from a firm budget, though.

He and his wife stood their ground, applying the bulk of their cash toward the design and construction of their new house and spending cautiously on high-tech amenities. “We really had to prioritize and separate our needs from our wants,” says the homeowner.



If there’s one thing the family needed, it was a whole-house music system “When we joined the project they already had thousands of songs—an equivalent to almost 2 terabytes of storage space—packed onto the hard drives their family PCs,” says Jacek Zaworski, president of Chicago–based Procom Enterprises. “Even more remarkable, they were playing that music through the tiny speakers of the PCs.”

Per Procom’s suggestion, the entire MP3 collection was transferred onto a single custom-built media server. A high-def cable box, TiVo unit, Blu-ray player, XM radio tuner and iPod docking station were added to the system and connected to separate audio and video switchers so that all types of media—both audio and video—could be streamed simultaneously to seven flat-panel TVs, dozens of interior and exterior speakers and several laptop computers.

Content from the assortment of A/V components, which share a common equipment rack in the basement, travels over a robust cabling infrastructure that was installed by Procom while the house was being built.

With such a wide variety of media available, Procom knew the family would need a way to easily access and control the equipment from several locations. A standard whole-house audio/video control system could have done the job, but the family envisioned much more than just music and video pickings for their high-tech home.

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