Whole-home audio installation · Leawood.

What a whole-home audio project in Leawood involves

Leawood hands us two different audio jobs depending on the street. North of about One Hundred Third Street the houses are postwar ranches and split-levels on modest lots under old trees, built long before anyone pulled speaker wire, and the work is a retrofit: cable fished through the attic and up from the basement joist bays, speakers cut into finished ceilings, a compact rack in a closet or the furnace room. South of One Hundred Thirty-Fifth, in Hallbrook, Ironhorse, Tuscany Reserve and Steeplechase, the houses are estate construction from the nineties onward, with large footprints and finished lower levels, and the work is planning a system that has to cover a lot of house.

The number that matters is not the room count. It is where people actually stand and what they want to hear there. An open kitchen, breakfast room and great room in a south-end house is one space to the ear, and the person cooking wants a different level from the person reading a few steps away. We draw the zone map around those listening positions, decide where a little bleed between zones is acceptable, and choose the speakers after that.

The rack comes next. Amplification for a whole house wants a central, ventilated, reachable home, and in a south-end Leawood house that is the mechanical room on the lower level. Heat is what shortens the life of an amplifier, so a cabinet with no air movement is not a location we will use. In a north-end ranch the rack is smaller, and a closet with a vent and its own circuit does the job.

• North-end retrofit. Attic and basement paths, in-ceiling speakers cut into finished ceilings, a compact rack. A few well-chosen zones rather than a speaker in every room.
• South-end estate. Speaker cable home-run to a lower-level rack, zones drawn by listening position, and a matrix amplifier carrying several sources to any room.
• Sonos first. A sensible start in a smaller house or a household already on Sonos, designed so the players can join a Control4 system later rather than be replaced.

Speakers that disappear into the architecture

The Leawood brief is that the music should be everywhere and the speakers nowhere. Sonance and James by Sonance architectural speakers finish flush with thin, paintable grilles, so a ceiling reads as a ceiling. Triad in-wall and in-ceiling speakers carry distributed audio across a large house, matched in voicing room to room. Where even a grille is too much, Stealth Acoustics invisible speakers mount behind the drywall plane and disappear under a skim coat of plaster.

Concealment is a labor specification more than an equipment one. Flush speakers need backing or enclosures in the joist bays so the sound stays in the room and out of the floor above, and the cutouts have to land where the plan says rather than where a joist allows. Invisible speakers need the drywall finisher to follow a written plan, and they give up some output, which is why we choose them room by room. Every location is photographed before the drywall closes.

One room in a house sometimes deserves more. A listening room or a library where someone sits down for a whole album is a different project from background music in a hallway, and that is where Focal and Wisdom Audio earn their place, with the room treatment planned alongside. Background zones and a reference room can share one system and one rack, and the keypad by the door does not need to know the difference.

• Flush architectural. Sonance, James by Sonance and Triad, with grilles painted to the ceiling. The everyday answer for kitchens, great rooms and bedrooms.
• Invisible. Stealth Acoustics behind a skim coat. Nothing shows; a little output is traded for it, so it is chosen per room.
• Listening room. Focal or Wisdom Audio in a room treated for it, on the same system as the background zones.

Sources, keypads and the patio

A whole-home system is judged on a few daily actions. Music that starts from a keypad by the garage door, because that is the door people use. A source picked once and sent to the kitchen and the great room together. A doorbell chime that ducks the music in every zone. A Goodnight press that silences the house except the primary suite. Those belong in the first phase, and everything past them can be added after you have lived with the system.

Sources are wider than the phone. Streaming services, a turntable, the television audio and the doorbell all become routable sources on a matrix, and Sonos players a household already owns join the same keypads. The control layer is Control4 or Crestron, with Lutron scenes calling the music, so the audio is one more button on keypads you already use rather than another app.

Outdoors is its own design. On a golf-course lot in Hallbrook or Ironhorse, several small Coastal Source speakers at low level, with a subwoofer buried in the planting, cover a terrace evenly and keep the sound on your side of the property line. The trench back to the rack is planned before the hardscape goes in. Our own crew does the work rather than subcontractors, the proposal carries one fixed price for equipment, labor and timeline, the workmanship warranty is five years, and Leawood is our closest market, so service is a short drive.

Control4, Crestron and Lutron in Leawood

IntegrateIT is a Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, a Crestron Elite Partner and a Lutron Certified Installer, so the platform is chosen for the house rather than for the dealer. Here is what each one does for whole-home audio installation in Leawood.

Choosing between them? Lutron vs Control4 vs Crestron, compared head to head.