Thanks to modern technology, your audio system is no longer confined to the one room in your house where your CD player and speakers are located.

Hi-Fi stereos produce high-quality sound reproduction that are very faithful to the original performance. Ideally, this equipment produces a minimal amount of noise artifacts and distortion while delivering an accurate frequency response. Given this, multi-room AV is generally better than a Hi-Fi because it gives you the freedom of having a distributed audio system in more than one room of your home.

Hi-Fi works on a two-channel infrastructure, so it is less likely to deliver the quality of sound that a multi-room audio system, which can be a 5.1 or 7.1 system, offers. Further, with multi-room AV, audio can be streamed through your house from an unlimited number of sources to a (potentially) unlimited number of zones, and it can be hidden, so you don’t have any equipment protruding into your living space.

Multi-room distributed audio systems are typically based on a single hard disk music server that digitally stores your favourite songs, and then uses Ethernet or a WiFi connection to pipe that music to other rooms. This allows different members of your household to listen to their own favourite tracks using individual room-based keypads/touch panels, amplifiers and speakers.