On August 5, 2012 at 13:28, SB Smarthomes said...
Ernie, I think iimig stated the main zone would need to be in all channel stereo because if you just took left & right out of the 5.1 or 7.1 pre-outs and put them into Zone2, you'd be missing all the dialog (center channel).
I was thinking he was commenting on the way you had set it up, whee you use the center channel information. Of course -- if he chooses to wire this so the center channel is not connected, then he has to put the system into a mode where there is no center channel. Given your solution, I don't see why anyone would do that. It's like you saying that it's easy to balance a motorcycle if you use three wheels, and he says that it's not so easy if you only use two wheels. He's not talking about your implementation, as I see it.
I'm not aware of a line-level combiner, but as you mentioned any mixer could provide this functionality. Several manufactures make 1U mixers that would do the job.
It'd be a good idea to come up with a cheap six-channel or so mixer. I've got one that would work just great for this: the portable battery-powered Sony MX-12 from 1971 or so. Two inputs can be made mono, the others left in stereo, so center could be added and the other four keep their leftness and rightness. You can't use this with 7.1, though. I'm sure someone has made one since then!
If you mix the line level out of the Main Zone pre-outs and then feed back into an input for Zone2 you've solved the audio delay and source tracking issues, but you'll still have independent Zone2 volume which might be desirable for some situations.
Well, not exactly. Just as having two faucets on a hose allows you to turn DOWN both of them, if zone 1 is turned down, you can't turn zone 2 way up. For that you need to go back to the old analog non-synced way of doing things.
For this job using the speaker level combiner does the trick by automatically keeping the volume in both zones synced which is ideal. It's such a simple thing, but just being able to press volume up/down/mute on the remote and have both zones respond is really cool.
Absolutely and definitely. I said "genius" more than once!
And you can still connect analog cables so other sources, or even this one, can be played in other zones with total independent volume control.
This is one of those silly CI things that a customer could never imagine how difficult it is to actually achieve. I'm not even sure why something like this is still so difficult to accomplish...
Lack of foresight on the part of manufacturers, or lack of willingness to cause the price to increase by adding a second D-A converter. We'd have no problem with zone 2 if every AVR had a second a D-A that would allow us to get a synced, two-channel mixdown of each digital input.
