'Digitizing' mechanical speaker selectors

[sdspieg premium]

sdspieg premium

30. Dezember 2017 at 3:54 #33154

Since I presume there are quite a few tech-savvy users on this forum, I’d like to ask the following question. I have a Niles SVL-6 ’speaker selector‘, which allows me to play music on any of the 5 pairs of (hard-wired) speakers that are connected to it throughout our house. On our old (expensive but not internet-connected) amp, which was located by the TV, we used to have an A and B speaker selection option – A was connected to our TV 5+1 surround sound speaker set; and B was connected to the Niles speaker selector, which allowed us to both manually select which speakers to stream music to, and to manually turn the sound up or down on any speaker pair.
After our old amp died, I refused to replace it with yet another expensive and bulky one, so I went for the Raspberry Pi/Hifiberry Amp+/max2play solution – which works great. But what really still bugs me, is that we can stream anything we want over IP (Windows, OSX, Android, IOS, etc.) to all of our speakers now, but we cannot ‚digitally‘ select which speakers to stream it.
I have seen a number of people inserting relays in parallel with the original switches in ‚mechanical‘ speaker selectors. For an example – see here. Is there anybody on this board who has found an easier solution to this? And also – there may be a relatively profitable niche market here for anybody who could come up with a ‚mod kit‘ for these older speaker selectors.