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[AVTechMan]

I've read some of the older threads regarding zones and though I have an idea on what it is I am still trying to grasp on the purpose of doing zones. Basically from what I am gathering so far, its based where you can, say separate your music from your PC to different areas of the house so as you were playing one song in the living room, and a different one in another room. Is this the basics of it?

Soon I will be building another HTPC to replace the current one I am using (it will be relegated to bedroom duty) and though my Onkyo receiver in the primary room do support zones I would lose 2 channels to do that so I was wondering whether to do zones from the primary HTPC going to a different one in another room (or another PC period). I do have another receiver though its a much older one (from the 70's) so the only way I could put it to use is to go analog. I am currently renting my house so i can't do any drilling holes or anything like that, but I can find ways to route cables along the floor to where it won't interfere.

Right now though I am working on the video end of MC16 which is working well so far, but once I get that fully going I am going to work on the audio end once I get all of my audio on the server, and that will take time as alot of it is on vinyl that I have to digitize. I need to get a better understanding on zones and the best ways to use them. I have an M-Audio 24/96 Audiophile sound card that I removed from my decommissioned video editing workstation that's lying around at the moment...perhaps I can use this in my new HTPC build and use it as an additional zone channel output...hmmm.

For those of you that have successfully gotten your zone setups going, what rooms do you have your music (or video) going to? Do you have your music playing from one source going out to different areas?

[rpalmer68]

You are basically correct.

Most people use zones to allow the playing of music to different rooms (zones).  So if you have say 3  outputs from your htpc you can have each run as a seperate zone.  You may have an HDMI output as one zone, the motherboard line out as another zone and maybe a spdif or another analog output on an audio card as another zone.

I used to have an M-audio delta 1010LT running into a multi channel amp to drive my kitchen, bedroom, and outdoor speakers.  The amp sat under the PC and I ran speaker cables to every room, this may not be a great option for you though.

You can also use DLNA renderers (like the JRiver ID, which is wireless)  to provide the audio signal to an AMP to run Zones in other rooms, or use a PC as a library server client, which means it will share the library with the main htpc and can be controlled locally or from the server.

Once you have your zones configured, they all appear under "Playing Now"  So you just select the zone you want and then browse and play your music like normal.  You can also "link" zones together to play the same music to multiple zones at the same time, with some basic options to try to get them in sync.


Hope this helps.

Richard