Single source - Multiple Rooms  

The more I think about it, your approach is probably the same route I will go. The quality of sound of the multi-room systems are really only for background listening. If an area requires that you are able to select different music sources, it should probably be setup with it's own system and speakers that are better quality than a multi-room/multi source system with in-ceiling speakers.

Hi all,

Just my 2 cents on this topic but probably the best way albeit not the cheapest is to purchase a muti room amp system like Kustom, Niles or Russound (I like the Kustom) and home run your speakers from each room to the amp. What I like is the higher grade model has slave Vol controls with ir (at each location) that will accept signals from up to 4 sources and you can control the sources at each location with your remote

Good luck

Gil

You can use any two channel amplifier (even an inexpensive stereo receiver which has many advantages) and feed it into an impedance matching device. The impedance matching device allows you to hook up several (4, 6, 8, 12) pairs of speakers but it will cause the amplifier to act as though only one pair of speakers is attached. In other words, you can take the output from the amplifier and feed it into the impedance matcher and that in turn will feed out to the additional zones. You can find an impedance matching device at your local electronics mass merchandiser. If your current 6-channel amp is 4ohm stable you can parallel two zones into each output port (2-zones per left/right) and install an 8ohm volume control at each zone. GilR's suggestion is good too if you'll be using different sources in different rooms (i.e. CD in one zone, Tuner in the other, etc...).



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-John G.

Another option I ran across is - JVC makes an speaker switcher (non amplified) as described by JohnG that has ir control. That's an alternative if you have some sort of ir engine running i.e. Channel Vision etc.

Rgds

If multiple zones means 3 or less, buy the ELAN Z630 Preamp to go with your ATI amp. It will be just what you need for distributing audio through the house, and you can use volume controls, IR, or keypads depending on your preference/budget. .02