New to the group. Please forgive any unintended breaches of protocol. I just built a house and had it prewired for stereo speaker pairs in 6 rooms / zones in addition to cat5 in each zone. My intention was to purchase a multisource / multizone audio system from a high end integrator. After reviewing several options - Crestron and Niles primarily - I ended the review dismayed with the cost and overall approach of the "main stream" solution providers. I'm a UNIX guy going back to 1983 - Altos8600 running a 5Mhz Intel 8086 with 512Kb RAM, 20Mb 8" Winchester hard drive and Microsoft's version of Xenix. I'm wondering if the present state of the Intel/AMD powered PC with Linux is robust enough to control multiple sources (4, 6 or 8) like digital cable box, directv receiver, XM radio, CD player(s), etc. and route the output to multiple zones/rooms (4, 6 or 8) in an effective and cost efficient manner. The Crestron approach would cost me around $10K - so I've got some money to invest on development if necessary. Once again, my apologies if I've breached any list/group protocol with this post.