First day with RTI 2-way equipment

Finally... Got back to the office at 3 p.m. and we had already received the XP-8, ZM24, and T2-CZ that we just ordered yesterday afternoon. Sweet!

I've got an upcoming system with a total of 3 Marantz receivers, 2 Escient FP-1 iPod docks, as well as some Sherbourn amps, a Sim2 and a Velodyne SC-1250. It sounds kinda funky, but one receiver is for the theater, one is for the 1st floor Family Room and in-ceiling speakers, and one is for the basement Family Room and in-ceiling speakers. So I'm using feedback from all 3 Marantz FM and XM tuners and the two Fireballs. Today I set up the AV8003, one of the SR5003s, the FP-1 (but didn't have an iPod with me), the Sim2, and all the RTI gear. Here are my first impressions:

Volume "pop up" feedback was a little slower than I wanted. I may have some timing issues I need to figure out, but considering pressing the Volume button first sets a flag on the XP-8, the XP-8 sends a command to the remote to make the Volume Pop-up buttons visible, then go back to the XP-8 which has to request send the volume command to the receiver, which then has to send out volume status rs232 feedback, which the XP-8 has to interpret, then has to send to the T2-C, which has to display the new info... I should probably just be happy with whatever I can get. I'll probably tweak it a little and see what I can get.

The FM tuner feedback is quick! Change a preset on the front of the receiver and the T2-C screen updates almost instantly. Very cool. I don't have an XM antenna setup to test that feedback, but I hope it's just as quick. Getting more info than the station number will be very impressive. [I know you've been able to do it with other control systems for a long time, but this is the first time I've gotten to do it on a handheld, ok? :) ]

As I said, I didn't have an iPod to test the FP-1 with, but I went ahead and set it up on the network and got it up and running. The "Artist, Genre, " etc. headers weren't visible for a split second when you go to that page on the remote, so I'm assuming that the headers themselves were feedback. If so, it was fast. IP feedback from an FP-1 to a T4 via WiFi was painfully slow, so I was surprised. Tomorrow I'll see how it is with an 8 gig iPod Touch.

Before I knew it, it was 5:30 and I wasn't hanging around anymore. But I had control of 2 receivers, 1 iPod dock, and the Sim2, so I was happy. Now it's just a matter of finishing the programming (now that I know the feedback and "drivers" work - I was worried about the AV8003 not working with the SR series driver, even though Marantz has kept their protocols the same for years...)

By the way, I found 2 funky things with ID 7.0. First off, I put a "toggle button" that was linked to the Multi-room A Power status and had a power toggle command on it. If the Multi-room was off when you navigate to that page, the button would not appear. Once it appeared it issued the command and tracked the power status perfectly. Secondly, somehow all my page links, which were all built inside System Macros, got shifted down by 1. So I had to go back through all my macros and change all the links. I definitely didn't do anything to cause that; in fact I don't think there's any way I could have done that. I'll be posting that over at RC in the "7.0 bugs" thread here in a sec.


Have fun, kids!