I'm wondering if anyone else thinks this would be a useful improvement. As it stands now, you can have music playback through any Movie Player and of course through the 4-zone Music Player. However, you can't link zones so that they are simultaneously playing the same thing at the same time (sharing the same NPL). All Music Zones are independent of one another.
I discussed this with Diptish and also with Chris at CES and they disagree with the usefulness of being able to link zones. K's view is basically that for true multi-zone audio distribution, you'd be hooking up the Music Player to a multi-zone amp with a control scheme that determines what plays where. My contention is firstly, not every user will necessarily want to use the Music Player when the Movie Player can do audio as well. That will obviously depend on how many audio zones you want in your home and where they are, etc. But if you only have Movie Players, you may not have the player's output routed to a multi-zone amp (or even want to do that).
Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, will you necessarily have multi-zone audio routed to rooms where you already have a Movie Player? In other words, if you have a Movie Player in your family room with a surround setup, will you definitely have separate speakers (in-ceiling/wall, etc) for distributed audio? Now, you could have a setup where a centrally distributed audio system routes a line-level out to an input of your surround processor in the family room. But if you already have the Movie Player there, you could seemingly achieve the same effect if the K allowed for linked music zones. Again, it's about choice.
Part of the reason why I feel strongly about this request stems from the fact that other music distribution solutions already allow for this capability. Sonos, SlimDevices, Apple's Airport Express, Yamaha's MusicCast, Olive's Sonata clients, etc all allow for this. So, it's not unique. And, while I'm sure it's no simple task, part of the beenfit of using proprietary hardware is that features like this are more feasible to implement. As an example of the contrary, Sonos' Desktop software doesn't include audio streaming. Part of the reason why they say they don't is because of linked zones, which is a core feature of their system. They say that doing this would be extremely difficult on a desktop application when hardware varies widely from computer to computer. Again, I'm not saying it's easy, but it certainly is possible. It would be nice for installers and customers to have more options when configuring a system for audio as well as video playback.
What do you folks think?
Jeff
I discussed this with Diptish and also with Chris at CES and they disagree with the usefulness of being able to link zones. K's view is basically that for true multi-zone audio distribution, you'd be hooking up the Music Player to a multi-zone amp with a control scheme that determines what plays where. My contention is firstly, not every user will necessarily want to use the Music Player when the Movie Player can do audio as well. That will obviously depend on how many audio zones you want in your home and where they are, etc. But if you only have Movie Players, you may not have the player's output routed to a multi-zone amp (or even want to do that).
Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, will you necessarily have multi-zone audio routed to rooms where you already have a Movie Player? In other words, if you have a Movie Player in your family room with a surround setup, will you definitely have separate speakers (in-ceiling/wall, etc) for distributed audio? Now, you could have a setup where a centrally distributed audio system routes a line-level out to an input of your surround processor in the family room. But if you already have the Movie Player there, you could seemingly achieve the same effect if the K allowed for linked music zones. Again, it's about choice.
Part of the reason why I feel strongly about this request stems from the fact that other music distribution solutions already allow for this capability. Sonos, SlimDevices, Apple's Airport Express, Yamaha's MusicCast, Olive's Sonata clients, etc all allow for this. So, it's not unique. And, while I'm sure it's no simple task, part of the beenfit of using proprietary hardware is that features like this are more feasible to implement. As an example of the contrary, Sonos' Desktop software doesn't include audio streaming. Part of the reason why they say they don't is because of linked zones, which is a core feature of their system. They say that doing this would be extremely difficult on a desktop application when hardware varies widely from computer to computer. Again, I'm not saying it's easy, but it certainly is possible. It would be nice for installers and customers to have more options when configuring a system for audio as well as video playback.
What do you folks think?
Jeff
