I tried something last night -- with the 950 in standby (only the yellow light below the power button on), pressing the "MULTI" button on the remote will bring on the front panel with the multi-zone menu. Switching the multi-zone mode on will then turn on the yellow ZONE light and cause the triggers to fire. As xyzfla says, the only thing you lose if you go to use the second zone while the 950's primary zone is off is the on screen display (which wouldn't really mean much if you were operating it from a remote location, since in most systems you couldn't see the TV anyway). That means you could use a "zone on/off" remote macro from another room and it would work whether the 950 was on or not.

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