Massively parallel (8 to 10 stream) music server/generator ?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 07:47:41 -0600,
  Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On the hardware end of things, I'm thinking one could use 1 USB sound
> card plus an amplifier for each zone.

If these draw power from the usb hub, you'll need to watch the total amount
of power being used.

> How many USB sound cards could a single i5 ish PC running linux in
> console mode feed ?  (MP3, wav, flac formats)

Probably as many as your hardware will support.

> Sometimes one will want to play the same music simultaneously across
> multiple zones.   Ie, during dinner, one might want to play music in the
> kitchen and the dinning room.   Is there a way to sync playback between
> multiple USB sound cards ?

You should be able to get pulseaudio to play the same stream to multiple
devices. I would expect them to be relatively close to in sync. I am not
sure how to easily do this.