The Outlaw 990 looks like a great product. I was planning on purchasing a 990 in a few months for a new residential installation. That installation has a two zone requirement: a primary listening/theatre room and a second “zone” consisting of four to six powered speakers placed throughout the rest of the home. What are the options for the 990 to deliver balanced output (ideally mono) for a second zone of speakers throughout a home? The eight balanced outs will all be utilized for the primary zone, and unless the 990 has some functionality I am not aware of, it seems I have a few complicated scenarios to get balanced mono for the second “zone”. These are:

Run the balanced Left, Right, Sub into a rack mixer to produce the needed mono mixed channel (and run the direct outs back to primary zone). The mono signal then needs to be split and fed into the distribution panel.

I could also run the unbalanced L,R,sub through a mixer that compensates for -10db and produces a balanced mono out. This has the same result as above but is not ideal.

The assumption with the above is that the LF information is contained only within the sub output, requiring all three channels to be remixed to create the mono signal.

If my understanding is correct, this implies a balanced mono out would be a terrific addition for a future version of the 990 (with a dedicated mute and possibly some eq).

Any feedback/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

We're still waiting for the manual PDF file to be made available, so I'm theorizing a bit. If you need balanced outputs for the second zone and want to use the independent second zone control, I think you will need to go from the unbalanced second zone outputs (which is a stereo output, no sub) to your distribution system. How that interface works would depend on how you are implementing the house-wide distribution - most that I've seen use a central amp and distribute directly from the rack to the speakers.

The only case I can see that you should need to re-integrate the sub into the left and right channels is if you elected to use the main balanced outputs and distributed to speakers that could reproduce data below the crossover point assigned to those speakers. In general, the in-wall or in-ceiling speakers that I've seen used for whole-house systems like this did not tend to reach down into the realm of 40Hz or 60Hz (or even 80Hz in many cases), and in those cases the subwoofer data would be useless anyway.

Does any of this help you out?