I listen to my iPod through the stereo in my car and through headphones while I work and exercise. But what if I want to listen to my iPod throughout my house, too? After all, the speakers in my home are the best ones I own.

Fortunately, working at Crutchfield gives me the opportunity to look into these types of situations. And we have some pretty cool multi-room options for our iPods. Here are two popular solutions:

#1: Niles ZR-6 six-source six-room audio receiver

The Niles ZR-6 is a six-source, six-zone receiver specifically designed to connect to an iPod, in addition to traditional audio sources. It comes with a special cable that allows the receiver to feed metadata — like artist, album, and song info — and audio from your iPod to each "zone" or location in your multi-room system.

You'll get to view all that great info, as well as jump through playlists and make music selections, using in-wall keypads like the Niles Solo-6 MD (shown at left). This kind of multi-room system utilizes speaker and CAT-5 (or Ethernet) cable that's run through your walls.

For more info on Niles products, check out our diagram of a Niles MultiZone system.

#2 Escient Vision and Fireball digital media servers

Escient's innovative digital media servers let you stream audio, and sometimes video, into other rooms using your wired home network — perfect if your place was pre-wired with CAT-5 cable run through the walls. Their Fireball digital music players offer multi-room audio, while their Vision media players add multi-room video with HDMI output.

Escient products are known for their intuitive on-screen displays (video output to a TV in each zone). These displays make it really easy to select playlists, albums, and songs using one of Escient's provided remote controls.

The Escient FP-1 iPod dock lets you play back your iPod in the room where the dock is situated, as well as any other room of your house where you have an Escient server or player set up.

For more info on Escient products, check out our article on multi-room systems.

Interested in setting up your own multi-room system? We can help! Call Crutchfield's AV Design Group at 1-800-555-9407.