Home Theater Speaker Selection @ Home Show Daily

Question:
I would like to put a complete speaker system (5 speakers) upstairs in my home. I have a complete home theater system located in my rec room down stairs. Is there some type of speaker switch that I can hook up to my system downstairs and then be able to have the sound on only upstairs if I wished and vice versa?

Answer:
Many AV receivers provide switching for a remote stereo pair, but full surround in a remote location is an unusual requirement.
Most AV receivers can't drive two sets of speakers at the same time (although I note you didn't want to do this), and generally the surround level settings would be quite different for each room, unless the two setups are similar (speakers, rooms size, furnishing, and layout). I am not aware of any commercially available five channel speaker switch. There are a couple of options: You could use multiple 2 channel switches (these are common), but that is awkward, since you would have to use three switches every time you changed over. In this case, be careful that both speaker sets can't be on together. If your system has them, you could use the line level (preamp) outputs to run the signal to a multichannel amplifier. This would provide the ability to balance speaker levels in each system independently, and would handle both sets of speakers at the same time, but it is an expensive option.