moviemagic

I have a question regarding a system. Say I put a home theater system in my living room. What if I want a stereo system in my room or throughout the house - is there a way to just buy extra speakers and hook them up to the reciever in the living room? Assuming that the living room setup will have a 6 speaker setup - how many more speakers can be hooked up?
Any suggestion on good receivers for this purpose?

Thanks

moviemagic

joshd2012

Yes, there are receivers which can do this. Mostly you will find this as a top of the line feature for most brands. I recommend you look at Denon, Onkyo, and Marantz. I believe that the upper models have this feature, but I am not 100% sure.

TheKobra

So will some of the Yamahas.

Sn0

Yes that feature is available on alot of systems. The draw back is that they use two of the amps in the reciever to power the "b" set of speakers, so you can only do multi room in stereo, you can not watch a DVD in surround and have the speakers play.

Master J

If your receiver has a B stereo output ( or even just one output A) you could hook up an impedence matching speaker selector (Niles makes some decent ones, but the 30 buck model from Rat Shack work well also).

The problem is, almost all receivers will not allow you to have 5.1 going in one room while powering a stereo pair in a remote location.

The solution if you want 2 different audio streams going at the same time, switched from one central receiver is buy one with multi-room/source capability. This will allow you to play 5.1 sources in the main room, while passing a secondary source such as a CD player through a pair of RCA outs in the back of the receiver.

You will need to hook the pre-outs either to an external amplifier or to an old receiver you have lying around. From here you have the same options as earlier....if you have enough channels hook a pair of speakers up to a dedicated stereo output, if not, hook up a speaker selector like mentioned before.

J

moviemagic

So as I understand it the problem really is powering both at the same time. However, if I intend to use only one at a time (say watching DVD's in living room and at another time just the CD in the room), then I shouldn't have a problem - Correct?

Moviemagic

joshd2012

Correct. In fact (I am not 100% sure of this; can someone back me up?) I think if you buy a receiver that has 7 independant channels, and put 5.1 in your Home Theater, you will have the other two channels to do whatever you want. In theory that works, but whether you actually can, I don't know. If you don't use them at the same time, as long as it has multi room/region, you will be okay.

stevevt

Some Denon receivers will do this, but most others will not.

With most multiroom/source receivers, you need an external amplifier to power the speakers in the second room.