"Jeff Thies" wrote in message ...

I've had my house sound down for a while and am unfamiliar with what is
on the market. Anything frugal that you know of that can do multizone (4)
and have a remote? Alas all I have is old and analogue. I want to keep all
the speakers and amps and just upgrade the tuner/preamp. I'm sort of
trending towards a dedicated PC and was going to track down an old bud of
mine that does home theater installs that I used to run sound with...
Lucky I didn't go deaf, his hearing rattles...

Jeff
Out of date on what's new. Way out of date.

I know the feeling. Back in the day I subscribed to several audio
magazines, had quite an impressive hi-fi system and hung out with a bunch of
like-minded goofballs. We even set up a club with a private lending library
of super-duper audiophile recordings. But today my last "holy cow" audio
system is packed up in boxes and I do most of my music listening on the
computer (which does have a subwoofer). I've upgraded our "home theatre"
system lately to make it more hi-fi as and I'm going to do more in that
direction (we need better speakers). But I also want to put a proper stereo
in our home office/library, but I have little idea of the hardware that's on
the market these days. I should probably some of the gear that's in storage
since it's already paid for.

A friend of mine went the PC route, put his thousands of albums (LP, CD,
DVD-A etc.) on a hard drive(s) in a dedicated music server (Apple Lossless
format) and uses a Sonos music system to direct music to built-in speakers
located around his house. There is a remote that looks like an oversized
iPod, and they have remote control apps for iPhone, laptops etc. It's quite
slick to be able to call up any music you please while reading the paper and
sipping coffee but without leaving your chair. The demo on the site below
explains it well.

http://sonos.com/Default.aspx?rdr=true&LangType=1033