One of the advantages or disadvantages of being a small manufacturer is that you are closer to your customers and more flexible. A few months ago I wrote up a customer request for a second 7.1.4 input on the I-Mon, this is now an option available for all I-Mon customers.

This month I received a request for 8 stereo speaker sets, I could see a way of doing this using the Main 8 channel output (4 pairs), the alternate 6 channel output (3 pairs) and the mini output.

It is not necessary for both Main and Alt outputs to be modified, for example you could chose to keep the 8 channel main output and modify only the Alt output so as to have four stereo speaker sets!

A-Mon

It was important that any modification is reversible so we designed a small PCB to fit between two connectors and re-route the Left and Right signals as required. We were ordering a new set of output PCB’s so we attached the extra board to it to minimize the cost. Inserting two identical small PCB’s in the A-Mon is the only modification required. No software changes are required to the A-Mon.

TMC-1/2

I thought it would only take a day to write the software, in the end it took two or three days (it always longer to write and test software than expected!). I am happy that I was able to add this as an option to the standard TMC-Amon software by defining 7 new user keys for the 7 extra speaker sets (Main 1, Main 2, Main 3, Main 4, Alt 1, Alt 2, Alt 3). The speaker set names can be user defined by setting the names of speaker outputs 9-16 which are not used by the A-Mon.