Receiver with Assignable Subwoofers to A/B or Zone? (1 Viewer)

[schematic]

Hi, I'm looking for a little help finding an HT receiver that meets a specific need that I've got as a result of some home remodeling... I need a 7.2 (or even 5.2 if there is such a thing) receiver capable of assigning one subwoofer to one set of mains and the other to another set. In other words, I need A/B switching with the subwoofer coming along for the ride. I don't think my rig matters much, but in broad terms: A is a 5.1 home theater with Artison mains and Velodyne MicroVee sub B is a 2.1 music only setup with Klipsch mains and JBL E250P sub Other requirements that should be pretty standard these days: - HDMI out and at least three HDMI inputs - Component video in with matched optical or digital audio input - Passive pass through of at least one HDMI input (for the wife's simple cable box viewing) Bonus points for something that can be controlled via Android, including power on/off and A/B switching. Best as I can tell, only Yamaha, Sony and Onkyo have this these days, but I'm far from sure. Also, would be nice to run both A and B simultaneously from different inputs but that's not essential. Don't need to spend for extra bells & whistles, but can spend what it takes. I'm upgrading from a Sony STR-DA1000ES only because it can't do this and I don't want to run two separate setups. Thanks all for any suggestions that would do the trick.

 

[Jason Charlton]

I'm not sure that any receivers out there operate their zone 2 quite in that manner. If you had a passive subwoofer for the second room, you could simply wire the speaker-level outputs for the second zone into the passive subwoofer and configure things that way.


A bigger question, since the second system is "music only," is why even bother with a single receiver with a second zone? Why not use a second receiver (I mean, beyond your comment of "I don't want to") Can you give us a specific reason why not? I think for the extra $$ you might spend getting a single receiver with a zone 2 that will work exactly the way you want it to (i.e. not the way they typically work), you could probably get a mid-level surround sound model for the theater and a separate 2.1 or simpler 5.1 model for the music room (set up to run as 2.1).


Perhaps other readers will offer other suggestions, but in my years on this forum, I don't recall ever hearing of a multi-zone feature allowing "assignable" subwoofer preouts.

 

[schematic]

Thanks for the quick reply and yours is a great question because I guess I'm asking for something off the wall without even knowing it. The big limitation is that my incumbent Sony doesn't have a line-level input, best as I can tell at least. If it did, I guess I could anchor the 2.1 setup with it while still being able to control the whole thing (minus the Sony's power on/off) from the HT setup. I guess I'll wait a few days to see if anyone else knows of one with assignable subwoofer outputs. If not, I'll move onto Plan B. Thanks again

 

[schematic]

Alright well I can only gather from the lack of responses that I am somehow looking for something exotic (or, probably more likely, wrong headed). I've given up on my dream of having a single receiver driving separate 5.1 and 2.1 setups through A and B channels (or even Zones 1 & 2). So I'm just going to get an Onkyo HT-RC360 for the 5.1 and run the 2.1 separately off my old receiver. Thanks for looking.