Multi-Zone Audio Revisited - Harmon Kardon 8 channel amp found

[kevind]

Greetings,

Came across this 8 channel (4 stereo) Harmon Kardon Amp for an extremely good priceHarman Kardon PA 4000

This is much less expensive than buying four separate amps to power four zones.

Now...I have read the manual online and all the details and think this could work...but am not clear on a couple of things

1 - It has 4 independent IR Sensor plug-ins. Does anyone know if using an ocelot and adicon one could simply plug in directly from the adicon and send the IR commands directly? Thoughts? Of course one could plug in 4 IR sensors and stick 4 IR emitters to the sensors but that seems cluttered and somehow not necessary.

2 - It has (what looks like cat5) remote keypad plug-ins on the back of the amp. Does anyone here have any idea what kind of trigger, I am assuming low voltage, HS would need to simulate the remote keypad commands?

Thoughts?

This unit sounds perfect for multi-zone audio and at $650 US it's a steal and much cleaner than using the 1 amp per zone...although the latter is still very good solution.


Kevin

[matssparr]

If interested, check my post in the hardware forum. But i agree it looks like a good piece, but somewhat limited for my purpose.

[jabrans]

The biggest challenge I see is that it only has 2 inputs. So you could only listen to a max of two different sources in the 4 rooms and how you select which of the two you want I'm not sure. It says it's for home theater plus other rooms so maybe one output is on one input and the other three outputs are on the other input? Would be better if each output had it's own input and you could preswitch what was feeding each amp. Maybe a little mod would be in order?

[Rupp]

I just recently bought a 2 channel Sony amp for $110 for my whole house audio. 4 of these would still save you money and be more configurable.

-Rupp

[stevene]

I purchased some used amps off of ebay for really cheap,

2 sony's and a jvc. They are perfect for my needs and total was about
$150 bucks. the sony's are 100 amps per channel and the jvc was only 2 channel but 240 watts per channel.

StevenE.