On September 28, 2007 at 13:05, tca said...
So if, for example, if I run line out of the home theater
a/v receiver to the customer's old 125 watt marantz a/v
amp, and then run this to the 6-way speaker selector,
out to six rooms with non impedance vc's, each room should
have ballpark of 20 watts or so, which should be more
than enough to each room?
Yes.
Customer is not willing to
spend more money right now on a dedicated 12 channel amp,
That might never be necessary. If this is going to develop into a multizone system when the budget allows it, then you'll eventually need the multichannel amp. If this is just a two-zone system and that Marantz is a beefy product, it might be all he'll ever need.
or any other amp for that matter, and I, like you, after
reading this post am leery of using the zone 2 on the
main a/v receiver to power 6 rooms, 2 of which are outdoor
locations which need more power.
Yeah, but is there some reason you couldn't use the Zone 2 amp in your receiver for two of the rooms and the external amp for the rest? I don't even know if that is a preferable approach. I'm suggesting it because it's possible. If there were eight rooms I'd put two on the Zone 2 internal amp and six on the external amp.
Whether you use matching volume controls or switcher plus non-matching controls is another choice to make, and all the posts above suggest that there isn't a clear-cut reason to choose one approach. If you had eight rooms and didn't want to use the internal Zone 2 amp, well, there aren't any eight-position switchers, so you'd have to use impedance matching volume controls. But theory is less clear than what your layout might force you to do.
