John, I have a follow up question to your comment about using a buffered Y connector.
I have a Denon 3300 AV receiver, a quite new Sony VCR player, a Sony DVD player, and 2 Mitsubishi TV's. I use the receiver and one of the TV's as my HT system, and the second TV is in my bedroom.
In order to allow me to view the DVD and VCR on the TV in my bedroom, I am using a cheap, manual AV selector and RCA cable from the selector to the bedroom TV. The DVD player has 2 sets of outputs, so one set is hooked up to the AV receiver, and one (RCA) set is hooked up to the AV selector. The VCR only has one set of RCA outputs, so I am using inexpensive Y-splitters to allow me to hook one output to the AV receiver and one output to the AV selector.
So, everything works great except that when I wish to view the VCR on my HT television, the AV selector must be switched to the VCR. If it is switched to the DVD, then I get a scrambled signal on the HT TV. This is quite confusing to me since I would imagine that the Y-splitter properly splits the signal, and that the HT receiver and TV would not be affected by how the AV selector is arranged.
I hope that my description is adequate to understand the issue. Would some type of "buffered Y connector" help with this issue? If so, what kind exactly.
Thanks very much for any comments that you might have.
By the way, I am also using the second zone feature on the receive, hooked up to an amp that powers two pairs of speakers. By diligently planning my remote (using a Radio Shack remote and JP-1), the whole system works great. Without the remote being finely tuned, I agree that the whole second zone feature would be cumbersome for most people to operate.
