I say supposedly, because I have not done that yet. Supposedly, you can then use your equipment compatible remotes (or a programmed universal remote) at the keypads to control your sources connected to the controller. It does allow for the plug-in of 3.5mm IR receiver cables (stick the pads to your equipment IR locations). I don't know of any app to control the zones. The kit comes with a hand held remote control with a pretty long range (it has worked for me in 10-15 foot spans with a line of sight). I would think as long as your cable connections are working fine, your Cat-5e should work as well. I installed this kit last fall (2019) after having run Cat-6 as part of my basement build-out. If you do this, then everything can be controlled on your phone, and you don't really need the volume knobs or the control panels. Lastly, it's possible to control the entire receiver via a smartphone APP, but that requires some extra gear which I have not set up yet. If your house is not pre-wired with CAT5 for the control panel, then you can just buy some and have the control panel's in a central location near your receiver, in which case you SHOULD be able to utilize your existing volume control knobs.

Just connect the wires attached to the control knob together (i.e., connect the wires from-the-receiver-to-the-control-knob with correlating wires from-the-control-knob-to-the-speaker) using wire nuts, and then replace your current control knob with the Monoprice control panel. If your pre-wiring includes the CAT5 cable at the same spots where you have the volume control knobs, then it's an easy transition. Since you can have multiple audio sources to choose from, you need a way to select which audio source you wish to play from, and the speaker wouldn't play with just the previously wired volume control since it could not select an audio source. BEST ANSWER: This is the same situation I faced when installing it, and I wasn't able to do so (though I'm not very technically sound).

Multi rack app