I recently set up a whole house audio system for my fraternity house. I am also in the process of setting one up for my parents house, and possibly one or two others soon.

These stereo systems have consisted of a a traditional stereo system (Reciever, amplifier(s), CD changer, Tape player, Record Player, Radio, etc. with speakers in multiple rooms all connected to this central location.

Such a stereo system has an inherent drawback in that:
A) Every component has a different remote
B) Remotes are easy to lose
C) To use remotes in all the rooms, you have to wire IR repeaters.
D) You don't have access to your MP3 collection through it.

What I had done for these systems was hook the stereo up to a PC through RCA cables for outputting audio from the PC (note that a stereo grade sound card costs $100-200), an IR transmitter/receiver for controlling the stereo components ($100-150). I then gave myself remote control of the computer through TV's by hooking up an RF modulator for display ($100), and an X-10 mouseremote for control ($50). Note also that this setup works best with a dedicated PC ($350), and loaded with win2k ($200) and musicmatch jukebox (free). This comes out to a grand total of $900-1200.

The above is quite a powerful system. It lets you display everything on a TV screen and control everything from there. This is great for parties and such. At my fraternity house, it also gave us access via the 20 computers on the house network I set up, access to everybody's private collections (10,000+ songs). Unfortunately, it has several drawbacks:
1. Cost
2. VERY time-consuming to set up (20+ hours)
3. Unlikely that very many people besides myself could maintain it.
4. Crashes every few days, usually requiring a physical reboot.
5. Since it has a fully operational OS, people may try to do other things with it. For example in my fraternity house, some idiot messed up the system several times trying to figure out how to watch XXX videos over it.

The Rio Reciever, on the other hand, is a very powerful, inexpensive, plug-and-play system with, judging by the empeg, the MOST powerful interface out there. It is probably also more stable, and it gives the ability to play different music in different rooms of the house.

Unfortunately, there are two features lacking which prevent me from purchasing 6-8 of these. This comes from that fact that I want to control one (high-end) stereo.

1) I want to be able to hook one RIO Reciever into the stereo and have the other RIO Recievers remotely control that one. If this is not already included in the software, it should be a RELATIVELY minor feature to add.

2) I still want to be able to use CD-changer, tape player, radio, records, etc. This means that I need some way to be able to control the stereo through the RIO Reciever. This could be through direct hardware interface to an IR emitter, indirectly through a PC, or some other method (via ethernet?).

I suspect there are many others in a similar situation, that have already invested a great deal of $$ in a house stereo system and want to be able to use all their equipment. The RIO Reciever is incredibly close to being able to meet that need, but just needs these two features to do so. If it could, it would be a steal at 3x the cost.

-Biscuits