I want 7 speaker surround (1 Viewer)

[Mark Weber]

It has been many moons since I seeked the advice of your forum faithful. The last time I had time to participate I was impressed with the candid and varied feedback I received. As a result I purchased what I would consider a fairly decent home theater set-up (Mitsubishi 55" HD TV, Onkyo TXDS797, 2 - JBL Studio S38II fronts, 2 - JBL S36II rears, a matching studio CC and subwoofer. Since that time I acquired another sub Polk Audio PSW450.

So I am actually in the process of building a home theater room in my basement and want to maximize my existing equipment and add two more S36II's to round out my system. Okay bare with my ignorance here.....supposedly the Onkyo can handle 7 speakers as long as I purchase a separate amp to drive the 7th speaker. So what should look for in a separate amp? Considerations for making this a pain free and simple set-up would be welcomed.

Thanks for your help...

 

[DonnyD]

Does your present Onkyo support the 6th speaker as a rear center? If so, then just run both the 6th and 7th speaker in tandem but make sure the receiver will run in 4 ohms for that channel at least. I currently do the same thing with a Yam RXV-1, running rear centers split apart and have no problem at all. Running two rears split apart is much better than one behind you.
If the Onk won't handle it but has preouts for the rear center channel, then a separate amp will be needed. An amp of similiar power, 2 channel.... with the preout from the Onk split into each channel, then you'll be driving each rear with the same signal.
Quite easy either way I would think.
Those JBL Studio series are making you a nice system I would think. I recently set up my brothers system with the same JBLs and I too use various JBL s including some old L100, S Center, S38, old Sats etc. I change out stuff often but keep coming back to those JBLs.
Good luck.

 

[BenSC]

Yea, my friend has those JBL's too, nice. Couldn't you run the 2 rear speakers in.. parrallele I think? To keep them at 8ohms?

 

[Josh~H]

Yea, my friend has those JBL's too, nice. Couldn't you run the 2 rear speakers in.. parrallele I think? To keep them at 8ohms?

You can run them in parallel at 1/2 the Ohm rating (which is more taxing on the receiver), or in series to preserve the Ohms. I'm running 2 Paradigm Atoms for my rear center channel out of my Yam HTR-5660. I'm running in series, and when I added the second speaker, the SPL didn't really drop according to my Radio Shack SPL meter. Therefore I didn't need to adjust the power to the rear center channel. It sounds good to me, and I have no plans to add a separate amp anytime soon. If I were to try external amplification, I'd do it to all 6/7 channels.

 

[David_Stein]

one thing that might be worth looking into:

with my denon 2802 (or at least as far as i can tell from reading the manual) when using the preouts for the back two channels and external amplication it will mirror the surround channels into the surround back channels during 5.1 material.

i really like the idea of that feature (other than having to do some thinking about calibration in the next couple days) so to me it was worth the 50 dollars i spent on buying an old 80s sansui integrated amp.

another amp to look for is the audiosource amp-one on ebay. it s 2x100 (if i remember correctly) and it can be had for around 100 dolalrs if you watch for a while.