Audio Filled Lakeside Paradise

A lake house with a pool, a fire pit, a covered outdoor kitchen, and a dock is really five or six listening areas that happen to share a property. This project put music and television in every one of them, all playable from the same Sonos app, with the equipment tucked away in a basement mechanical room and a dock cabinet.

The porches came first: the upper porch, the lower porch, the lower walkway, and the guest porch each got a pair of moisture-rated recessed speakers with their own Sonos Amp in the equipment closet, so each area is its own zone. On the grill porch, the homeowner's television went on a tilt mount beneath the vaulted wood ceiling with a Sonos Arc soundbar under it.

At the pool, a Sonos Port feeds a high-powered amplifier driving two James Loudspeaker planter speakers that disappear into the landscaping, with surge suppression on the outdoor audio lines. The fire pit has its own Port, four landscape speakers, and an 8-inch buried landscape subwoofer. Down on the dock, a television on an articulating mount, a Port, and an amplifier in the dock cabinet drive two recessed speakers above the boat slips and an on-wall stereo speaker on the sun deck column, with power conditioning and a vent fan in the cabinet to keep the electronics cool.

The head end is a compact rack in the basement with IP-based power conditioning, so both the homeowner and our Smart Care team can reboot any piece of the system remotely without a trip to the lake.