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Looks like I need a new receiver, and I'm more-or-less clueless (multi-room setup)

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Looks like I need a new receiver, and I'm more-or-less clueless (multi-room setup)

Old 06-23-06, 02:50 PM
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Looks like I need a new receiver, and I'm more-or-less clueless (multi-room setup)

Ok, so about five years ago or so, we got your basic Sony home-theater-in-a-box setup. Receiver, five speakers, subwoofer. Since I didn't live anywhere near anyplace with knowledgeable employees, I had to just go off the specs and what I knew of the brands, so I just picked up a system that had 100W per channel and sounded ok in the store. The place we lived was a small little apartment, so it worked just fine. We're not audiophiles by any stretch, and everything sounded just great. We knew that we could have gotten better, but we weren't willing to spend more.

Fast forward to last week...

We moved into a new townhouse, and the original owner went all out when the place was being built. Not only is there a media room pre-wired for surround, but there's a multi-room speaker system with speakers in the ceiling in the kitchen, living room, and master bedroom, as well as some wiring for them out on the deck (he took those speakers with him when he moved, though ).

Now, our brave little Sony system is looking downright sad next to all this beefy equipment. The speaker wires in the media room are so thick they won't even fit in the receiver or the speakers, and the ones in the other room are just going to be gathering dust until we get a receiver that can do multiple outputs.

Now, from what I remember of the previous owner's equipment, he had a single receiver in the media room (the wiring for the multi-room setup all comes in there, too), what looked like some sort of switch box for the speakers (it was about receiver-sized, with three buttons on the front, which he had labeled with the different interior speakered rooms), and another box that just had some lights on it, which I'm assuming was an amp.

My problem is that I'm pretty much in way over my head, here. I'm not looking to spend a mint, and what's really confusing is that when looking online at receivers, the wattage output per speaker is actually lower on some of the expensive models than it is on our current one. Is there some other spec I should be looking at that determines the general performance of the thing, or is it just a matter of finding a place that has the different stuff set up?

From my meager amount of research thus far, it also looks like I'll definitely need to get an amp, too, since a receiver by itself wouldn't ouput enough power to power the surround system and eight other speakers all at the same time. I've never had to look for an amp before, so I really don't know what I'm looking for there...

Finally, is there anything else that I should be aware of? I read something somewhere that mentioned something about a protection circuit in speaker switchers, and if you do something wrong with it, you can severely damage your receiver... wtf is up with that?
Old 06-23-06, 03:07 PM
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All wattage is not created equal and specs are very misleading.

Driving multi-room setups is very very demanding on equipment and may require additional amps. You will need something with a high current power supply, Yamaha, Onkyo, Denon and Harmon Kardon come to mind.
Old 06-24-06, 11:09 PM
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What Brian said. My 40watt H/K totally blows away my 100 watt Sony POS. Not only in power but in sound quality. I'm a H/K pimp...so highly recommend them.

This gives you the basics and hopefully some ideas.


http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/IS...int=1&page=all

The most common multi-room audio desire is to pipe the music you're listening to in one room into another. Many receivers have a second set of main speaker outputs — also called "B" speaker outputs — and sometimes even switches to turn the different speaker pairs on and off. If that describes your receiver, all you need is a long run of speaker cable leading to the speakers in the other room. You could also add a wall-mount volume control for the second set of speakers.

But what if you don't have multiple speaker outputs on your receiver? Then you'll need a speaker selector/switch box that accepts the output of your receiver and allows you to connect (and control) one or more additional sets of speakers for remote locations. It also helps you get around a nasty little problem that can occur even when your receiver does have several speaker outputs: impedance drop.

Generally, when you wire several sets of speakers to a receiver, its amplifier "sees" the two speaker pairs as a single electrical load. (Technical jargon alert: Just to keep things simple for the purposes of this discussion, we'll just say that the speakers are connected in parallel and have the same impedance — if you want to know what all this means, you can go here for an in-depth explanation.) Why is wiring two sets of speakers in parallel a problem? Because the receiver "sees" two sets of 8-ohm speakers as a single pair of 4-ohm loudspeakers — and low impedance loads like that can cause the amplifier to overheat and possibly cause permanent damage to the receiver and/or loudspeakers.

So, most speaker selector boxes contain built-in protection that presents a constant impedance load to the amplifier. You usually pay for this with a slight loss of overall power, but isn't knowing that you're not going to damage your amp or loudspeakers worth a few watts?

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