MultiZone with Surround Sound Setup

[twildt]

Hello. New to the community and basic knowledge of Audio.

Setting up a whole house setup and trying to figure out best way to setup surround sound in main living room and wiring it all.

Plan currently:
5 total zones.
4 zones are pure audio.
5th zone is living room. Trying to figure out if I want to go surround sound or just use WiiM amp and call it a day?

If I go surround sound with 5.1 dolby or higher, what is a good budget AVR unit I can integrate easily? So many to choose from.

Now, after this decision, my next delimma. How do I wire this up? The living room is farthest away from my AV closet. How do I connect the TV to the AV room that is 75ft away? HDMI or something else? Going to purchase new TV that has HDMI ARC, optical, and the other usual.

If I go with WiiM amp only, I have this sound bar with bluetooth subwoofer I would like to integrate. My thought here is I buy the WiiM amp for my 4 ceiling speakers, and a WiiM Pro for the soundbar. Then use the WiiM app to connect the two when I watch movies or whatever. Is this best way to integrate a soundbar? The soundbar does 5.1 surround, but will I lose that using the WiiM pro? Is there any way to connect a soundbar to TV direct to get surround AND connect the WiiM amp speakers along with it?

Sound bar has 2 connections only, 2.1 plug or optical. Can optical run 75ft?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Crawdaddy]

So many good questions that apply to me as well. Would love to have someone answer these questions. Also, will one Wiim Amp power 4 ceiling speakers? I have a similar setup (4 ceiling speakers in living / kitchen area, 2 more in dinning room, and 2 more on my deck - all in the same living space). I am trying to avoid going Sonos.

 

[twildt]

Same brother, avoiding Sonos. I found a thread on here, WiiM replied, said you can run up to 4 speakers(8ohm), if you run them in parallel.

Now this amp has 2 channels so I'm assuming each channel would run 2 speakers wired in parallel. So in reality, each channel can handle 2 speakers.

4ohm less speakers.

Only other way I can think of if that's wrong, is to combine each channel somehow and run them all in parallel together? Don't think that would make a difference but I'm a novice here...