Max2Play Home › Forums › General Questions on Hardware and Max2Play Versions › General advice for an 8 Zone system › Reply To: General advice for an 8 Zone system
I have done something similar with a couple of pi’s. I have several old slimdevices SB’s, Radio’s of various vintages and types still in circulation as well as several max2play pi’s running squeezelite. The SB radios are in the bathrooms and home gym, the rest of the squeezebox’s are co-located with the family room stereo and basement home theatre. However in my rear porch and kitchen I have wall mount and ceiling mount speakers and no pratical spot for a stereo system. For those two installations I ran the speaker wire back down to the basement to a 19″ rack. I built two pi’s and installed them in two hifiBerry metal cases with the XLR DAC pro variant HAT’s. They plug directly into separate 2 chan. amps. Of course Max2play is running on all the pi’s , and I use the volume control on the squeezelite S/W via the material skin URL on my phone to control all the players and the volume per player. I often have the porch, family room and kitchen sync’d together but not always. The Crown amps are very powerful , several hundred watts per channel, so I set the gain on the amps to 50%, to help avoid accidents. Everything works very well. I don’t see any issue co-locating all the Pi’s with a 8 channel amp as you mentioned. I did have a pi4 running as the LMS server for a while and it worked great with a 90k track library and 8-10 players. I have since moved the LMS to a jail in a FreeNAS server which also hosts my music library.