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!