Australian Passive Solar Home

It’s not an energy efficient home feature, but it’s one I am very pleased with in our new house. It’s a DIY sound system speaker switch I developed with Silicon Chip magazine.

With the electronics design by the brilliant John Clarke, it allows the simultaneous switching of multiple speakers and amplifiers from one wall-mounted selection knob. The main features of the switch are:

• Wall-mounted rotary switch
• Modular design is expandable to up to three amplifiers and 18 pairs of speakers
• Simultaneously switch main and subwoofer amplifiers and speakers
• Wall switch is configurable for the number of speaker pairs that can be selected
• Wall switch uses standard Australian household wall plate
• LED indication on wall switch of power and the selected speaker pair
• Quick and easy plug-in Cat 5/6 cable connection between the wall switch and main relay board
• Terminal strips allow the use of heavy-duty speaker cables
• Suitable for use with amplifiers up to 400W (4Ω) or 800W (8Ω) per channel
• Can also switch 70/100V public address speakers
• No signal degradation through switch

In our house I use three of them to switch three amplifiers powering the internal and external speakers.

Inside the house, the three amplifiers run four 8-ohm wide range ceiling speakers, three 100V wide range ceiling speakers, and two 15-inch 4-ohm subwoofers located in the loft.

When switched to ‘outside’, the inside speakers all turn off. On the outside deck, two 4-ohm wall mounted speakers and a 4-ohm subwoofer switch on.

Since the three amplifiers, and the three switch boards, are located in the loft, no real estate in the living area of the house is used. Further, the amplifiers (and a Bluetooth streaming module) are activated by wall power switches, so it’s all remote controlled.

It works really well.