r/homeautomation • u/Its_just_U • 12h ago

QUESTION HELP! Russound CA-4

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Not sure if this is the correct sub so if there is somewhere more appropriate please let me know!

We bought a house with a Russound ca-4 controller and four keypads with ceiling speakers in four different zones in the house. All worked great until the controller quit.

I was able to find a used one online. I plugged it in and it has powered on. Three out of four zones turned green but I cannot get any of the keypads throughout the house to power on. There’s no sound being passed through and no way to change the source or power zones from the controller.

Does anyone have any experience with these units and wall panels? Do I need to repair these to the new controller somehow? Any troubleshooting suggestions are appreciated. I don’t want to have to pull out these panels or replace the whole system.

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u/ZanyDroid 8h ago edited 8h ago

This is a multi-room audio question, there isn't that much of an overlap between that world and this subreddit

Heck, even the multi-room audio is kind of balkanized.

Maybe try cold DM'ing people who have asked about this online. It works more than you think.

Nuking this from orbit probably isn't as much work as it might think and TBH may be the rational thing to do here given the age of the system. Look at what the wiring to the panels is (probably CAT5 or better, is my guess), find someone who has the installation manual/remembers the installation instructions. The real hard part was pulling the speaker wires, doing the nasty drywall work for the speakers, ...

(I looked in my sub list for the AV installer subreddit, I think i read r/CommercialAV from time to time. Yeah, I know that's commercial but I'm sure there's better overlap between that and multi-room.

Another idea is to search for the popular multi-room systems these days. DIYers like the various rebadges of this: https://www.daytonaudio.com/category/237/multi-zone-amplifiers

IMO these are kind of at the edge of going obsolete. Doesn't use modern Web APIs; there's one that is modern APIs but I can't remember the name since I decided to go with WiiM, which is a distributed architecture sort of multi-room system. Distributed architecture is way more popular on Reddit nowadays)