All of these posts and nobody answered his questions.

A meter can be used, as long as each wire is referenced to the others, in case a staple pierced or sliced the insulation and it's causing a short. If you want to find out where the problem is located, you need a TDR (Time Domain Reflectometer)- I bought one by Triplet and it seems to work well enough. I used an Ideal, but its display is very dim, so it's not usable in bright light.

If this guy likes to crank the snot out of it, sell him a system for cranking the snot out of it, not a consumer system.

Also, look for apps that can be used for audio analysis, like RTA, tone generator, oscilloscope, etc. TI recently used a signal generator app to find some resonances in a room that were described as "it's coming from the left speaker" but was actually caused by the vanes on a diffusor on a supply duct from the HVAC- the contractor had bent one of them and it was too close to another and when certain frequencies were produced at a sufficient SPL, the duct and diffusor would resonate. I set it up to sweep from around 40Hz to 300Hz and it was much easier than trying to find it with music.

What surge protector is shutting down from whatever that AVR is consuming? I would look at the maximum volume setting- I don't set it higher than -10dB for anyone because I know that at some point, someone will try to make it louder than it should be and I don't like receiving calls about blown speakers. If they blow speakers, there's a decent chance that it may be damaging the crossover and possibly, the amp.

Speaking of the amp, it sure would be nice for the manufacturers to provide the damn specs that we need, in order to make an informed choice for system design. Pro/commercial manufacturers are required to do this and if they don't their products won't be used by many contractors and system designers.

In-wall speakers aren't gonna do what this guy wants when he's hammered. Not only will he reach the limits of the speakers before the amp, if the voice coils become too hot, 'thermal compression' occurs and then, he might want to crank the volume control more. It's a vicious cycle. He either needs more speakers or more sensitive speakers and if possible, more power from each channel before distortion. The way most AVR manufacturers state their specs, there's no way to know what will happen if they choose Party Mode and all channels are sending crappy power to the speakers. They even show a half power distortion spec. That's fine if it will be played at half power and someone will be measuring the distortion, but they need to drive ALL channels at full bandwidth when they measure THD+noise and IM if they want this crap to survive. They're using cheap power supplies and they don't want to tell us about it but it's easy enough to see this- if it has a 4/8 Ohm switch, it's not going to do much if someone cranks it (it's only for UL, anyway) and it limits the output.

QSC is another brand that makes bulletproof amps but the Triad speakers aren't made for this kind of application- he wants loud, not great, and when someone is gooned, it's not likely that sound quality is their main goal.