Re: Zon Audio distribution question

["wkearney99" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Watts per channel is often overrated for multiroom distribution.  The
average room is more than covered with as little as 20 watts.  Really,
you're not doing a full home theatre experience in every room so it's rather
pointless to overspend on the amplification.  And when you do "need" more in
a room none of the keypad systems can do it without adding an amp anyway.
At that point they're all the same.

As for digital distribution, think about network congestion.  If you push an
analog audio signal around it's not going to ever be limited by network
throughput.  It's just an audio signal and the technology involved in
getting it distributed, amplified and controlled is relatively simple.
Digital, on the other hand, requires putting Digital-to-Analog decoders into
every keypad.  You're at the mercy of how decent the software in the
decoders is and how well updated it's kept.  That and you're faced with
double-transcoding if your source material is kept in one encoding and the
keypad needs something different.  In an analog distribution system this is
being done once at the head-end, not over and over again at each keypad.
Then there's the matter of how much bandwidth is necessary and/or available.
The keypads on the wire (or airwaves if it's wireless) all listenting to
different sources will each require a fair chunk of bandwidth.  Add more
keypads and you potentially start running out of bandwidth.  That and
syncing multiple rooms all listening to the same source (whole house party
mode) is notortiously difficult with digital disitrbution.

Sure, in a perfect world digital might in theory be better, but in practice
it's usually not.

That said, more intelligent keypads with better playlist control is an area
where digital systems seem to be making more progress.  My solution is to
just use relatively dumb A-Bus keypads and then do all the playlist control
from either a touchpad PC or a handheld pocket PC running NetRemote.  Not as
'well integrated' but a lot less expensive.

-Bill Kearney


"Envoy" <rsammeta@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Thanks Robert  for you response.I heard that ZON system is the only
system that supports and transfers the date in Digital format and thats
what interested me in ZON, Also ZON has more watts per channel.
Do you know of any system (suports atleast 4 zones) like a centralised
media server(hard disk) which has the media collection and the audio
can be selected from keypads(browse by song) apart from elan system.