Greetings all! I've come out of "forum retirement" to try and solve a little dilemma of mine that's come up here recently and hoping to gain some insight. Since my last post, I've moved into a new house, gained a couple additional subwoofers, beefed up my front sound stage with some tower speakers and am generally enjoying my system. I've hopped on here from time to time just to peruse the discussions but haven't posted anything in a few years now. Glad to see some of the old dogs here are still on and active, hope all has been well with you guys.
Anyway, here's my situation: the house I moved into conveniently had in-ceiling speakers already installed for the living room area, and two separate zones elsewhere in the house. Awesome! Well, I proceeded to ignore the ceiling speakers in the living room and set up my usual surround sound system, figuring I might utilize a few of those ceiling speakers for atmos, which I did in fact end up doing.
However, running everything off my Yamaha RX-2060, I could only feasibly run the front presence/atmos speakers, leaving me in a 5.2.2 configuration, with the rear presence connections being assigned to the separate zone so I could run the other speakers in the house. This leaves me with either option a.) abandon the idea of having multi-room audio entirely and connect the rear in-ceiling speakers in the living room for a 5.2.4 thereby giving me the full atmos effect, or b.) leave it as it's connected now and have the ability to pipe music throughout the rest of the house in conjunction with the main system (good for parties, or just my wife and I hanging out around the house). Unfortunately my AVR only couples the extra zone outputs to its presence channels, so I have to make a sacrifice one way or the other. I wish they'd couple one of the zone outputs to the surround back channel as I don't use that one due to my room dimensions. But, I want my cake and want to eat it too - so hoping for a solution that will allow me to regain the front and rear atmos channels without sacrificing my multi-room music. Hopefully all that makes sense.
THEN, I remembered one feature in my Yammie that I've never really played around with. MusicCast. So I pulled up the WXA-50, and I'm curious if I would be able to use this in conjunction with my AVR, and basically wifi that multizone output through this device and connect those zone speakers (there are two separate pairs, all impedance matched for 8 ohm as seen by the amp), and then be able to simply connect my rear ceiling speakers for full atmos. Do these things work that way? It looks to me as if the WXA-50 basically controls the audio itself, but I want to be able to play what I already have connected to my AVR (we play a lot of iTunes through my AppleTV 4K unit for example), and have it stream to the WXA-50 which then itself drives the other zone speakers. It seems like this would work but I'm not as familiar with the MusicCast feature (yet).
My only other option is to upgrade my receiver, which for me would be a straight-line right to the newer Yamaha RX-A8A which seems to have enough powered outputs that I could keep both of these things. But the WXA-50 is a $550 solution vs. a $3000 solution.
Sidebar: Oh and as a funny note, I discovered that pretty much all the speakers in the house were wired incorrectly upon moving in. I had to spend 2 days basically re-wiring everything and getting some new hardware to ensure they were correctly impedance matched before hooking it all up to my receiver. It was a catastrophe, and clearly an example of a previous homeowner doing the DIY thing but not knowing what in the h*** he was doing lol. I have to wonder if he managed to make the magic smoke come out of his equipment before giving up on the idea. Anyway, I digress.
Appreciate any feedback on this question and cheers to you fine folks!