doh! stupid sony receiver 2nd zone.

sunday afternoon i saw the simpsons with the potts at the alamo draft house in katy. it was good, but it was pretty much just a longer, bigger viewing of the tv show. not too surprising i guess. the animation work seemed to be higher quality overall, which should be expected i guess. but i didn’t go because i was super-excited about seeing the movie — it was just the best of the choices that were showing.
i had a “good idea” [tm] recently, and on tuesday i went about bringing it to fruition. i have this nice enclosed front porch where i’m currently staying, and when the temperature is agreeable it’s nice to go sit out there. (there’s a ceiling fan, so that helps widen the definition of “agreeable” to include times during the houston summers.) i have a recliner out there, plus a chair and sofa that came with the house. so anyway, i realized my sony str-da2000es receiver has a 2nd zone, which allows you to run an output line to another area. the 2nd zone is controlled separately from the rest of the receiver: you can choose a different source than the one currently playing on the receiver…it’ll even stay on when you turn off the “primary” portion of the receiver. so i went and bought some cheaper but still decent sounding logitech z-4i 2+1 speakers, then picked up a 20 foot 1/8″ stereo extension cord and an rca to 1/8″ stereo adapter. i hooked it all up and commenced to configuring.
unfortunately, upon reading the manual for my sony receiver, i learned the 2nd zone will only play analog audio sources. that knocks out my dvd player, since i currently only use digital co-ax for it — but that’s not too big of a loss. the bad one it knocks out is the itunes audio coming from my airport express, as i have that feeding from an digital optical audio line. on other devices i could possibly feed digital and analog signals at the same time, but the airport express uses the same plug for either analog or digital. one of the cool things was going to be playing itunes and hearing it in my computer room, the living room, *and* the front porch. i had hoped maybe i could trick it into feeding some out line into an analog in line and cheating the system, but some tinkering with it never produced good results. oh well. i can listen to my cd player on the front porch, as well as the tv audio. and since my tv is dish, it has a number of music channels — including sirius satellite. so it’s not all bad.