Whole house volume controls?

All volume controls, by their design, degrade the bass response of a speaker. You would do better to install a system that has an amp for each room. Systems of this type are made by Russound, Elan, Crestron, etc. Control can be accomplished by any number of wireless rf systems if you do not have Cat5 run to each room.

Interesting. I have Cat5 and a single 16-ga. speaker wire running to each room, so I could choose either.

Are these little amps for each room actually decent quality? Can they drive bookshelf (as opposed to in-wall) speakers well?

I have an amp I can use centrally (Rotel bridged to mono, 300+ watts), so that option is cheaper for me, if it can work well. Has anyone used some sort of centralized impedance matching box that gets around the degradation tberhart is describing?

- Eric

Niles are very good, simple, reasonable price, and keep the signal good. That's not to say great--this is not an audiophile volume control, but for whole house, good quality background music where you don't want excessive noise from a cheap volume control, this is a good choice. I have used them in 2 homes now with good (not audiophile great) success.