As part of the basement build out we included a home theater area (not dedicated in a separate room but perfect for late night movies) as well as zoned audio in some of the other rooms of the house.  For the theater I selected the Marantz SR5003 as the A/V receiver which among all the other great features supports separate zones (up to three I believe depending on configuration).  So far I have been extremely happy with the SR5003 but I did have a bit of trouble getting the zones to work the way I had expected.  For my setup I was looking to utilize only zone A.  The Zone A output channels can use the internal amplifier if 7.1 is not being used or supply line-out if the primary zone is configured as 7.1.  One thing to note here is even if you are using the pre-outs into an external amplifier you will still not get the powered channels for the secondary zone if all 7 pre-out channels are used (this was confirmed by Marantz support). In my case my theater is configured as 7.1 but the zoned system I am using expects line-out only so no issue here however I was still having trouble sending any audio signals from the receiver to any of my zones.  After much searching I came across the answer to my problem.  The Marantz supports both analog (zone A) as well as digital (zone B) signals to the secondary zones. I was using the analog outputs for zone A but all of my inputs were digital and it turns out only analog inputs are supported for the analog output in zone A.  I did not see anything related to this in the documentation and maybe if I sit down and think for a bit it would make perfect sense but thanks to a great Multi-zone flowchart which made mention of this fact I was able to get the zoned audio working the way I had expected.  I still want to try a few other configurations when I get a chance but progress is good!

I have had good intention to start blogging for some time if for nothing else to help me build a reference of projects and interests I can refer back to over time.  I have gotten started a few times over the years but something else always seems to come up and I am ultimately sidetracked to more important matters and the discipline of posting in a timely fashion is quickly lost.  Case in point, I setup this blog over a year ago and after spending a good bit of time putting together a theme and tracking down add-ins never actually got around to posting anything.  A bit later I updated to the latest version of BlogEngine.NET but still nothing.  Well, I am going to give it another go.  I recently finished up two big projects, my MS in Software Engineering and conversion of our basement from a concrete cave into great hang-out pad, so I now have a bit more time on my hands.  The basement has been a big project and we still have a few items to finish up (we may never actually be completely done).  I plan some detailed postings for a few of the more interesting aspects of what we have done but I thought adding a few pictures here would be a good start. 

Hopefully this will not be the last post and I will be able to provide something of use to someone or at least a good reference library for myself.

Cheers!