Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Advice for driving 8 x Outside Speakers + 5.1 HT

I've been conversing with Brent about the setup for some outside speakers and how to drive them. Looks like I need
- Area 1 needs 2 Pair of M3 Outdoor Speakers (already have them)to cover the entire back yard
- Area 2 and 3 each need a Pair of in celling speakers for two separate roofed deck areas

So I have 8 Speakers I need to drive, and at present I have only a Yami RX-A3000 (7.2ch) that is currently doing duty driving my Axiom 5.1 setup. I used to drive one pair of the Outdoor M3's with the spare 2 channels as a separate Second Zone and it was OK and I could control it via the Yami Android Application.

Brent recommended the Axiom Amp but I have a few questions about what would be the best configuration between the Yami and the Axiom Amp.

- Most of the time we use the inside HT 5.1
- I'd like to have all of the outside as a separate Second Zone but be able to switch ON/OFF each of the three areas independently. Sometime we need just background music on one of the decks, other times all going flat out in "Party Mode"

I figure the easiest setup would be to keep the current Yami Setup as is but feed it's Zone 2 to an 8ch Axiom Amp and put in some manual switches on the speaker cables to turn on/off the 3 desired outside areas.

The thing I don't like about this setup is my 8ch Axiom Amp would be sitting there doing nothing most of the time, which seems a waste.

I was then toying with if I could use the Axiom to drive at least the front 3 of my 5.1 setup and use the remaining Yami and Axiom channels to drive the outside speakers.... but this seems pretty complicated.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Nathan