A guy from my work is wanting to set up a whole house audio system that will stream music to anywhere in the house, and he wants to have touch pad type remotes on the walls to access the music and such. I guess you would need to have a regular remote too, unless of course he wants to get up and stand next to the wall everytime he wants to change songs.

Anyway, any suggestions?

David I suppose Axiom is the answer on this particular forum for the sound system but as far as the whole house remotes, touchscreens and wiring I've used some IR products from these folks and have been pleased ... Elan Home Systems

Unless he has 2-3 CDs and just wants to select between "romantic", "sentimental" or "liberace" when he comes back home with a date.

His main Listening room consists of a Dynaudio 5.1 system. I think he wants to go with in walls or ceiling speakers for the rest of the house.... I have already suggested that he take a look at axioms.

Smarthome.com has anything and everything to do with home automation. I have purchased many products from them and am very pleased.

I would reccomend the Xantech MRAUDIO8x8, This system comes with keypads that has a small screen, touchpanels are more effort than they are worth IMO. I have installed many of these xantech systems and cant recall any of them ever failing. I also had to maintain about 30 systems with Elan equipment and nearly all of them had problems be it the power amps, controllers or the touchscreens or keypads. I wouldnt reccomend them myself.

OK, so I was going to look at these systems for my father in law as well. We've already got all the wiring installed from their remodel over the summer. I was looking at a Nuvo system. In the interim, I had them get a Sonos.

But now you can do it relatively cheaply if you're willing to use powered speakers. Have a PC/Mac running iTunes, a few Airport Expresses, an iPod Touch or iPhone with the Remote app, and run Airtunes. You can stream from different iTunes libraries to different Airport Expresses in your house. All of them can be controlled via Wifi on an iPod Touch/iPhone. I use this with my Macs and AppleTV at home. Works great, plus it's relatively cheap. You can even hook up the Airport Express to your existing AV rack. The only downside is that the speakers do need to be powered.