Music Player to 16 Processors

[cinematechguy]

Hi all,

I need to make this brief.

I operate a 16 screen cinema and we need music playing in all the screens between the films. As yet for the past 15 years we have had a cd player for every screen, plugged into the cinema sound processors by RCA (red and white phono) cables.

The processors are all in one projection booth, but the booth is about 400ft long.

I want to stop buying cd players when they die, as its costing us a bomb. SO what I want to do is...

Have 1 music player (iPod, CD/DVD deck, PC) to serve all the screens at once. Im guessing RCA cables arent strong enough to carry one audio signal to all the screens over that distance, so I am guessing id need a series of 'booster' boxes along the route to carry the signal along?

The other problem is that we need to split the signal at various points along the route, to go off into each sound processor.

Can anybody advise me?

I need to do it cheap-ish, but we are also looking to save money in the long run, so any solutions (cheap or not) will be very much considered.

Even if we cant send the audio from 1 device to all the screens, if we can share 1 signal between 2 or 3 processors at once that would be a satisfactory compromise.

Regards

CinemaTechGuy

[bigBonehead]

You could use a custom made patchbay to run an RCA input to XLR balanced outs. Running 200 feet is no problem with Hi z balanced XLR.. Then on each end of the XLR at the sound processor, an adapter like this would convert back to RCA: Hosa GXF-132 - Audio adapter - Female RCA to F 3 pin XLR

XLR connectors are cheap: xlr connector - Google Search

Cable is sold by the foot... I'm thinking I would charge someone 200 > 300$$ for the patchbay