Hey Brian and Arindelle,
Making different zones and choosing the zone you prefer to play in from the tablet works, however, it creates an added layer of complexity for the end user. As you mentioned from seeing my site Brian, I have started Wolf Audio Systems, and House Of Stereo in Jacksonville is one of our pilot stores. The issue I have is that clients of the store are seeing a Media PC and JRiver and Hi-Fi file formats for the first time... now add in the concept of zone switching on a tablet app (pick any one of the tablet apps, they are still alien to the uninitiated) and getting it to play with some degree of reliability - it is a huge learning curve!
What I ended up doing in the interim is this: I remembered that MC20 was still installed on the system, so I configured 20 (and its' different Media Network key) to be in charge of the Ayre. I then left MC21 in charge of the Parasound, and created two different server entries in JRemote and EOS, one named Ayre and one named Parasound. I did it this way because it is easier for the average guy to switch between servers than zones. Both 20 and 21 are set to startup with the machine, so that the listener can pick his DAC source at the tablet, adjust the input on the Parasound integrated and get playing. Both 20 and 21 use the exact same library sources, so there shouldn't be too much difference to the end user, especially as this system is configured for two channel listening (as opposed to my house where I play every file imaginable, audio and video) At the weekend I will do some more playing around with managing zones with one instance of the tablet apps to find the easiest path to adjust so that we can just utilize MC21.
Brian - If you are close to Jacksonville, Private Message me and come give the Wolf Audio System a listen. Bill Gibson owns House of Stereo here in town and he is one of the most brilliant guys I have ever met, and is also a damned good musician. Putting the machine in his mid-level High End room was a transformative experience for me, coming from my home setup to a true professional room, and once we do the official launch party, the machine is going into the bad-ass Super High End room. Exciting stuff.
While we have a handful of sales under our belt, we have purposefully kept the pool small because the initial adopters are part of our beta testing network where we are perfecting our support model. The Wolf Audio Systems machines will have a full-blown IT support back-end, where we will manage pretty much everything computer-ey so that our customers can treat the machine like any other audio appliance. We don't want you to have to have a Computer Science background to use it, but we have left it open enough where if you want to tinker or branch out what the system does in your home, that is possible too. It's been designed so that my Mom can use it, and in that we have been successful. We are currently gearing up to launch the product officially before the end of the year, so we have a lot of hard work ahead of us in terms of finishing the site and finalizing some of the specs for the machines. If we could get the prices on SSD's down a bit, that would be a major win. I really don't want to ship these systems with less than 1TB of SSD storage.
Anyways, back to it! I will update this page with the path I eventually take, and guys, please! Keep the ideas coming. Someone on here always mentions something that I hadn't thought of before, and it often leads to bad-arse breakthroughs.