Originally posted by: Basilisk
Not as simple as that sounds, for some, both for wire-management and in daily use: my friends' 804 requires about 15 minutes (really!) of wire manipulation and gentle rotation of the 804 chassis to get -partial- access to the rear plugs: thus all three (four?) of their digital inputs would have to be permanently doubled-up with RCA-pairs. [That's the curse of beautifully manufactured, ridiculously expensive cabinetry with inadequate width in either tower and only front-access.] Three more wire-pairs would make it even more difficult to maneuver/access the 804 which already has all its input-categories in use. Once re-wired, each time you want to use Zone-2 for normally digital-sourced material, you'd have to go into the 804 set-up and re-assign the audio-source from digital to analog... and re-re-assign it when you're done with Zone-2 and want the full 5.1 back in service.
So... sure... you -can- get the Zone-2 function with dual-wiring in some cases, but it's NOT convenient or desirable in other cases, and it seems silly to compromise the 5.1 system in the main area while you do it. The set-up complexity of the 804is already at a level where my friends are uncomfortable making changes, or recovering from the things their teenager accidentally does to it! The sane solution would be for Onkyo to make Zone-2 trivially function as a Front-speaker clone... IMO. Well, not meaning to rant on this topic, so apologies if it's coming off that way. It just seems to me that Onkyo's design of Zone-2 is about as satisfactory as my friends' HT cabinetry!