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Here is the situation: I have a fairly large space (including living room, kitchen, dining room, tv area) which is pretty much all open plus a deck. Currently renovating and planning for audio. Number of speakers: Living room 6 , kitchen 2, dining 2, TV area 2, deck 2. I'd like on/off/volume control for different areas. I can't see playing different sources but I suppose that would be a feature.



Option 1) 1 Connect:amp per speaker pair. That's 7 x $500 = $3500

Option 2) 1 Connect for each area + multichannel amp. 3 Connects (living room, kitchen/dining/tv, and deck) plus something like the Russound D1650. That's 3 x $350 + $1000 = $2050 plus I get two extra channels or I could bridge to the outdoor speakers. The D1650 has screws for volume control on each speaker so I could fine tune before using Connect for volume control. I'd lose some of the savings in wiring and figuring out some 12V trigger workaround.



Thoughts?
Why not skip all the separate paraphernalia, and go for play units as suitable? Between the 1 and the 5, singly or stereo paired, and with a Sub where needed, they offer enough permutations to check every possible box.



Except outdoors, which needs passive speakers with a Connect Amp indoors.
Fair question. All speakers are in-ceiling.
I was in a similar situation 8 years ago, and ended up using a SINGLE Connect Amp and fed that to a SIMA SSW-6 speaker selector from Amazon (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006JQ62/), and used that to feed in-ceiling speakers in 4 rooms and a pair of outside speakers. Also installed Russound volume controls in the wall at each location for local volume control, which also has a way to control speaker impedance so as not to overload the amp. Has been working absolutely fine for all these years. I am just not able to have different songs play in different locations, but I don't need to so I never threw more money at that.
Interesting. That's a very minimal use of Sonos. I want to use the zone select and volume control from the Sonos. Just wondering about the Connect Amp vs external amp(s).