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[kpurch1]

I am starting to build out a basic distribution system and would like to know if Media Center 10 is capable of playing the same Input or play list out through multiple zones.

Say I have my master zone in the Home theater area and a Kitchen Remote zone.  I may wish to play different content in both zones but sometimes (more often than not!) I would like the Kitchen Zone to play and track identically to the main.  

I want the option of playing different content and I always want the volume controls to be distinct so so I do wish to setup zones as opposed to just splitting the output.

Thanks
Keith

[Matt]

There isn't currently a way to synchronize zones.

The reason is that it's hard to guarantee that two different sound cards will play in step with each other.

However, it'd be a good problem to tackle in MC 10.1, so stay tuned.

Thanks Keith.

( p.s. check out this page for some great MC multi-zone info: http://mastiff.now.nu/ )

[loraan]

The reason is that it's hard to guarantee that two different sound cards will play in step with each other.

This is soooo true. I ran into this problem when recording through two different sound cards. I was recording a concert with Cakewalk Sonar. My mics were recording the room through a USB soundcard while I was running a feed from the soundboard into my laptop's line in. I didn't anticipate that the tracks would not be synchronized and one would drift slowly off from the other! There must be some weird thing going on because I was even using identical sampling rates on both of them. Nevertheless, the drift was slow but inevitable.

In the end, I had to go through the entire file and manually stretch it every few minutes before it got too far out of synch. Strangely, the rate of "out-of-synch-ness" seemed to vary. In other words, if I stretched the entire audio track so that both the beginning and end of one card's were in synch with the other card's track, parts of the middle were out of synch. Huh!

What you might do is get a matrix switch for your speakers or your line-level signals so that you could put any one or more MC zones into any one or more speaker zones. In other words:

MC plays Zone 1 -> matrix switch -> speakers zone 1 and 2

or you configure the switch this way:

MC plays Zone 1 -> matrix switch -> speakers zone 1
MC plays Zone 2 -> matrix switch -> speakers zone 2

Don't even know if anybody makes such a switch, and if so, is it remote-controllable? And how much is it??? But that would definitely address your problem.

Come to think of it, I know that they make distribution amplifiers that would do what you want. But they run in the thousands of dollars...

[Eiffel]

  I'm glad to hear this feature will be considered for 10.1... I have a single card which can play multiple tracks (Delta 410 with ASIO drivers), so issues with different cards should not exist...

Eiffel

[Mastiff]

Another version would be to mute and unmute digital line in on the "daughter zones" so the "mother zone" is played on them as well. Girder can be used for that.

[kiwi]

I'd be really interested in this being handled in a Matrix manner.  You have X playback sources and Y playback zones.  You can route any of the X sources to any of the Y zones.  

RME does something like this for their cards, you have real and virtual inputs (hardware and software), these can be routed to any of the outputs.  And even mixed.

kiwi

[AoXoMoXoA]

Sounds great Kiwi
sure beats my homemade switch-box signal controller, (manual rotary switches which send any of 4 inputs to any number of the 4 outputs), simple, effective, but ideal - NO!