Multi-room Amplifier Question

Audio Gear Talk
1

5 years ago I bought a house pre-wired with about 16 rooms of audio. The previous owner went all out, in addition to the usual suspects they put speakers in the laundry room, bedroom closets, etc. The system terminates in a closet with master and slave Audio Design Associates Millennium amps as well as some secondary amps.

Over the past few years, I’ve been removing the in-wall controllers and put in a bunch of Sonos Connects as my sources. I then set the source on the amp to the appropriate room and never change it. This worked well until a few weeks ago when both the primary and slave ADA Millennium amps died. I’m not getting any sound from the Millenniums now but am getting it from the secondary amps. I believe this is due to the power being constantly on and the closet being hot and I have a workaround for this going forward.

My understanding of ADA was they were a fairly high quality, high end component manufacturer so I took to the interwebs to see if I could cheaply replace them with like parts. I managed to find one primary Millennium online. That will give me 6 inputs. I need another 4-6 to replace the slave (some are not in use, so not a big deal for the moment). The alternative and easy solution is to buy some Sonos Amps instead, but the price adds up when you are buying up to 6.

Now before you all kill me with Sonos is a crap music system, my use case here is background music. Sonos has been a reliable system for me for years for this purpose and that’s what I value most. I have a very nice, high end ADAM Audio/Bricasti M1 networked DAC in my sound room for my hifi setup.

So my mission is clear, I’m hunting for value here… can anyone recommend an alternative to the ADA products for my needs? I did find an ADA Genesis which would seem to work but I feel that seller is asking too much for it. Any ideas or opinions on this are greatly appreciated!

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I suspect you just need a multi-channel amp having removed the controllers.

Meridian do a good quality rack mount 8 channel class D amplifier, it don’t know how the price fits with your expectations.

You can also get up to 8-channel amps built from Hypex modules from the guys who build to order (eg Nord in the UK).

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AV power amps will be what you need here. Marantz do do some beefy ones, I suspect most of the other manufacturers do as well.

I think Niles Audio is worth looking at as well, I used to have one if their 2 channel power amps based on Hypex models that was quite good. Their background is integration.

If you are using Roon, you can switch to using network endpoints such as Raspberry Pis. NAD and iFi have inexpensive ones as well.

Not sure how much you would be spending on the distribution amps, but it might be cheaper to go with Bluesound units all through the house.

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Thanks to you both, some good options in here. Looks like the Meridian 258 or the Niles SI-1230 could fit my needs.

On the sources, thanks for those ideas, but I’m already invested in Sonos unfortunately.

I am looking at Bluesound PoE speakers for a future build.

2 Likes
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BTW if you need more than 8 channels - I checked Nord Acoustics - and they do a 16 channel n-core. Which is available to rack mount if you need that.