To answer your question on how to deal with many systems: 17 years of buying/selling upgrading suddenly allows you to accumulate a lot; when, you have no expenses other than car insurance and rent... (no car payment either..)
Single, No Girlfriend (most of the time), Sold Cool Car, bought more stereo gear.
I also had a high end HT and sold off those components and sacrificed to high end inwalls and put that money into my 2 channel system (concentrate on one and limit tweaking on others (power/isolation/footers etc as this small stuff bled me dry).
1- Main Stereo (2 channel) Wilson/Theta/Squeezebox - Master Bedroom
2- HT 5.1 EAD/Niles/Squeezebox - Living Room
3- B&O2500 - Dinning room
4- Panasonic all in one - Garage
5- Office - 4 BlueRoom Minipods/Sherwood Receiver/Paradigm 10" sub attached to my Computer system with two 20.1" LCD monitors
To reduce the cost of other systems in other rooms look at the Squeezebox 2/3 and get it modified (Red Wine or Boulder Audio www.audiocircle.com has both forums) on the analog outputs and then run that into an amp and speakers. This makes for an ultra cheap great front end and your not carting your music all over the house! Stream all your music from one PC in the house... I use a table PC to control both of my Squeezebox on my two main systems.. plus I can take it out to the garage and hook it up to my garage system and have access to my collection there or at the neighbors.
