Firstly...LMAO. I get that a lot, that is, about the lack of brevity in my writing; it really can be tough for me to skip the details at times, 'cause I kind of get off on them.

Secondly, it was indeed a pretty big undertaking, but I did all of this piece by piece (after work, weekends, etc). It was a bit like that episode of Seinfeld (when Jerry talked about how he was shaving his face in the shower...and the just kept shaving 'everything else') in that the house had no networking in it when I bought it...so I started thinking about having CAT5 drops in each room, and then as I pondered that, I thought "well...I'm pulling all this CAT5...why not pull shielded twisted pairs to each room while I am at it?".

Yeah, I love the way the 990 is to my audio system what Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport is to Delta Airlines.

The beauty of this is that I have an absolutely noise-free stereo feed to each room, and then from there, I can do with it what I want / need, so yes, you're right that each room has local gain...but I opted for self-amplified near-field monitors (M Audio CX-5) so that I would not have to buy any more amplifiers (and have them take up space). I managed to get some great deals on the MX-5's (and I use a pair for my recording mix-down work, so I know their timbre well), which could likely still be had - I haven't looked in a while, and probably shouldn't, lest I be tempted to buy another pair. So yes, the preamp in any given room is the local 'gain cop'.

One last thing...the benefit to whole house audio (apart from a nice even loudness level throughout the house) and of using the same speakers almost everywhere in the house is that the bass sounds remarkably good; there are multiple drivers (because of each pair of speakers) in various spaces, and this helps to add up to a fair amount of surface area, and thus, volume velocity, and also seems to smooth out the overall bottom end response. It also means that the overall spectral balance is pretty closely matched, room to room (i.e. only each room's acoustics affect the overall response). Thus, each room (more or less) sounds the same and as such, any one pair of speakers does not call attention to itself. As far as the bottom end question goes, I have yet to verify that with measurements, but I suppose that I could some day...

Thanks for the kudos though - it's nice to see that I'm not the only one out there who thinks, as Matthew Broderick (as "Ferris Bueller") once said: :..."You can never go too far".

Mark