Firstly, is your installer not recommending products for your job ?

As an installer, I recommend a variety of products due to cost, situation, and control system etc.

You are asking all the right questions, which is great, but the person installing this should be putting you at ease with your questions.

1. There are many different type of AVR's on the market, some are only IR (some have a jack in the rear others have to have eye on the front), some RS232, some IP.

2. Yes there can be a difference, depending on make and model.

Do you have any makes or models on your quote ?

3. No, it doesn't. There needs to be a proper control infrastructure built on the IP side. Something a good RTI programmer should know.

4. Yes you can, as long you use separate IR/RS232 ports you can use 8 of the same equipment (excluding the use of esc-2's and PCM-4's)

5. I utilise Arcam AVR's for the better quality of audio and Pioneer for the lower end. Both allow me two way feedback to give information back to RTI keypads and iPads, like volume level source selected etc.