Any advice would be greatly appeciated. I've always been more interested in just music, rather than the home theater experience. But now I'm considering buying an AV receiver, such as the Denon 2803 or the Yamaha V557 because they seem to offer so much value, even in strictly audio applications. My current system has 6 pairs of speakers (one pair in each of 6 rooms). I have an old hafler preamp, an even older Mitsubishi analog tuner, and several newer (by my standards - they're from the late 1980's) power aplifiers (rotel, yamaha, carver, NAD) connected to a Niles MRZ-6 Line Level Multi-Room Control Ssytem. The Niles unit offers 6 sets of pre-outs and a whole host of remote control capabilities, but I don't use the remote control capabilities. I really just bought it to have all the pre-outs. The Hafler preamp only has one set. I can control the volume of each room via the Niles. I have to listen to the same source in all rooms, but that is fine with me.
I really need to get a newer tuner and I'd really like to have a preamp with more input and output options. The AV receivers all have several digital inputs and at least one digital output, and they have a staggering number of analog inputs. The Denon 2803 seems very versatile. It has several sets of pre-outs, as well as several speaker terminals driven by the receiver's on-board amps. My questions: Would it be possible for me to simultaneously connect/run three amps to the pre-outs and also drive 3 sets of speakers connecting them direclty to the receiver's speaker input terminals? That way I could get rid of the Niles unit. But is it possible to connect a power amp to the pre-out called "front speakers" and at the same time run a set of speakers directly from the AVR's speaker terminal called "front speakers"? Would all the Dolby Digital Surround ET 7.1, DTS Pro-logic 2, etc. screw things up if I'm just using my system for old fashion two channel stereo? I've noticed that some of the Yamaha receivers have a feature called "2-Channel Stereo Mode" and "Analog Mix-down". I wonder if something like that could help me. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.
