What products would give the best experience working with CQC?

[sic0048]

For your multi-room audio, do you want keypads in each room for local control? If so, Russound is about the only player around anymore. If not, then there are other options available including something as simple as a Sonos or even Alexas.

PVR/DVR solution - I highly recommend looking into SageTV. It is now open source (it started as a private company which Google bought and integrated some technology into their fiber boxes before open sourcing it) and the community is still going strong. It has good integration with CQC as well. It's a computer based system, but you can use clients to view on the TV (so you aren't trying to hook a computer up to each TV). They use to sell hardware clients (HD-100, HD-200 and HD-300 devices) which is what I primarily use, but they have been out of production for years and are not readily available. The good news is that there is a great Android client and many people use Nvidia Shields as clients at the TV. They work great and offer plenty of other advantages than just SageTV. I actually have a Shield and not only do I use it at home, but I even carry it with me when I travel and I can hook it up to a TV and have access to my home Sage system when away from home. SageTV supports all kinds of tuner options as well. Personally I have cable, so I use a 6 channel cable card tuner which allows me to record up to 6 shows with just one cable card rental ($2/mo). I don't have a single cable box in my house and therefore save the $8-10/mo per TV that most people pay for their DVR system. There are also plugins that add features like commercial skip and recording extension (monitors sports events and will automatically extend the recording time if an event goes past the originally scheduled ending time) that really make this system a powerhouse.