Audio Switching

["Dan Khan" <dhk@xxxxxxx>]

Guys,

Any of you done this (surely) or know of any products that can do it:

I want to feed the line out of my PC soundcard (probably from home-seer)
down over Kat5 to my home cinema amp downstairs and announce it over the
speakers.

What I really want to do is to either switch the source of the amp
dynamically when HS outputs audio, or perform some audio switching of the
input signal to mute whatever signal was going into the speakers at the
time
and just output out my PC audio.

Anyone done a similar thing?  I'd be interested in different solutions -
e.g. do I need to trigger an IR event in HS to send input switching to the
Amp, then send more IR after the announcement has finished?  Or, do I need
to get an audio switcher(?) box that I plug my DVD/TV/etc audio into before
going into the Amp so it can switch when it detects input on a certain
pre-determined line (i.e. HS PC)...  does this affect the sound quality of
incoming signals (i.e. DD, DTS, THX, etc).

As you can tell - I'm not quite sure!

Any help appreciated.

Regards,
-Dan