I am just building a house and went thru all of this pain in the last few months.

I bought a bunch of T2 in wall speakers (I think they renamed them) and the Outdoor variation for the deck & garage, and am hooking them up to a Leviton amp. The Leviton amp has 7 inputs and six powered zone outputs with a controller in each output zone (room).

For the inputs, I'm going with my Cable Box (music channels), my AVR, Two computers, and an Apple Airport Express.

Basically I'll be able to send any of my inputs to any of the output rooms and control everything in each room.

The Leviton amp is pretty slick, 50W/channel * 12 channels.

They don't really market to retail, more a custom installer item. However, its easy to set up and you can pick it up online.

Have a look here:

http://www.leviton.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?item=127530§ion=22381

In this way you have easier control of your system than running everything from a single unit which was not designed to be controlled from the speaker locations.

Just my 2c