Gonk's posting made me realize that I mis-spoke on my original post. I have the TAPE LOOP (2 channel) going into VIDEO 3, not the pre-out (6 channel) as originally stated.

The three remote amps are daisy-chained from the Zone2 Out connection (they are Carver TFN-6B amps, so they have in and out for daisy chain). They are not on all of the time, but we do use them frequently enough to add music to some large rooms of our house. The architecture of our house is a buch of large open rooms, so it's not practical to have different sources in different rooms (hence rigging main zone and zone 2 together), but the rooms are too large to power with one set of speakers. I also like to keep the three remote zones at a fixed volume (usually lower than the main zone) -- that's why I'm going from the Zone2 out vs. just tapping the pre-out.

Just to test the hypothesis of the TAPE LOOP not going through xover, I'll daisy-chain the amps out of the TAPE LOOP. This would actually work fine for my application since (1) the remote zone control is only really needed for the 12V trigger to power on the 3 remote amps, and (2) the amp volume is controller locally through trim-knobs on the amps.

If TAPE LOOP doesn't go through the crossover, then this will work just fine.

As an aside, I can listen to all of the relevant sources in zone 2 since I run (begrudgingly) both optical [for main zone] and analog [for remote zone] from each input device. It's a bunch of extra cable, but no other good alternative.

Thanks for your input!