I haven't touched arduino in many years, and I want to build a new home theater system which will be controlled by arduino. I need to monitor the volume of at least 5 channels, and adjust them, probably by relay. What hardware should I be looking for?
Hello Northland
And welcome back 
It depends on the interface specifications.
You can start with a block diagram to identify the physical and logical interfaces to the home theater, quite simply.
I am making a better version of 5.1.
These are the goals:
- When there is height sound, such as aircraft, bird, weather, spacecraft, meteor etc...I want this to come through the height speakers ONLY. FFT might do it, but monitoring channels for voltage can help identify patterns which are specific to the sound.
- I would like to emulate atmos on 5.1 format for old (and new) movies. This requires matrixing. Again, monitoring voltages.
- I need to monitor the SPL and adjust master volume between say 75db and 85db.
I need to measure the voltages of the preouts of the decoder and the levels are somewhat equal. This helps to identify which channels are active, and this data will be used to make decisions about adding signals together and activating (or attenuating) speakers via relay.
I don't know how well monitoring voltages will tell me about phasing. I guess another way to monitor phase is to use a current transformer to monitor the AC current of each channel, because it's either in or out...which may more easily tell me if they are in phase. If I do this on the amp outputs though, it creates circular logic, because I am altering those currents by switching loads. The preout currents may be too small.
If I need FFT, I need a fast processor. I have many nanos and megas, but too slow. I have spent many hours researching esp32 and teensy, and my brain hurts. If I avoid FFT, I guess I can use what I have. It's been so long since I coded I might as well be starting fresh...
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