I do this quite a bit. I seem to get many jobs that require a family room theater system that also serves as the hub for a 2 or 3 zone DA. Most of these places are under 3500 square feet and many are larger condos. The budget is usually between 8K and 20K depending on the TV(s) and number of rooms. I will often use a Denon 3806 and configure the distributed audio with separate indoor and outdoor zones. I try and limit the zones to just a couple of rooms for all of the obvious reasons. I will use 232 for control of the receiver which really helps the speed of all zone macros, radio station tuning, etc...

I will often use a T3 in combination with a K3 or second T3 each configured as a master controller with the ability to select activities in any or all zones via color coded buttons and backgrounds.

I am working on a 3 zone job now using a 3806. There is a hub family room theater in a slide out rotating MA rack using custom trim shelves. There are three rooms (Dining, Living, Master Bed) on zone 2 and 3 mono outdoor areas on zone 3. I am using fixed outs from both zone 2 and 3 to feed 2 Sonance 275x3 amps. The homeowner did not want ANY devices on the wall in the house so I used 3 Xantec RAT1 VCs to control individual volume in the indoor rooms. The outdoor areas use on-wall VCs in the utility room. The T3 is designed with 5 nearly identical (The theater zone differs from the stereo zones) GUIs utilizing transparent buttons with different color backgrounds (Theater=green, Dining=cyan, living=Red, Bedroom=magenta, Outdoor=blue sky with clouds). Each color background indicates which zone (and room in the case of the indoor zone) contols are currently active onthe remote. The page forward button flips the page between rooms (colors) to toggle quickly for individual room volume/on/off. Through the use of flags the user can choose any combination of room/zones to activate via the Home button and the remote will track which rooms should be active (provided no one starts pushing button manually) to eliminate toggling through inactive rooms with the page forward button.

I prefer to jump straight from this type of install to separate dedicated home theaters and DA systems using matrix switchers and skip the whole Xantec/Niles DA kit thing. I guess this is due to the high number of retrofits I do.

Two way of some kind would be great but hey, this gives the customer alot for for the price points I mentioned.