Andrew Pezzo

External vol control for outdoor speakers

A co-worker has been picking my brain the last few months in prepartion for his HT. In addition to the main HT he is going to install some outdoor speakers (polk, dont know model but about 80 watt speakers) and a volume control knob to put on his deck. He went to radio shack and got a 50 watt voulme control unit. He hasnt purchased the receiver yet but is going to get an HK, AVR-325 I think, and is worried about the fact the rec puts out more watts than the vloume control knob can handle. This is a bit beyond my scope so I was wondering if there are any issues he should worry about.

Any thoughts?

Dave Milne

Andrew,
The AVR-325 only puts out 50wpc, so no issue.

If your friend picks a more powerful receiver, then theoretically he could damage the volume control. In practice, however, it's not likely since it would require setting the receiver at full output and using the outdoor volume control to pad the level down to something reasonable.

Patio speakers are typically just for background music, so if you set the receiver volume to just "moderately loud" and pad the level down from there with the outdoor control, your pretty safe with just about any receiver/speaker combo. On those rare occasions that you really want to rock on the patio, leave the outdoor level control at full (effectively taking it out of the loop) and adjust volume with the receiver.

Considering all of the hassle wiring a volume control on the patio (cutting into walls and such), your friend might want to look into an IR repeater to allow the use of the receiver's remote on the patio.

Andrew Pezzo

Thanks for the advice. Based on that and his own judgement he is returning the unit and will just control vol through the receiver. He realized he ws just being lazy by not wanting to walk a few extra feet to get to the rec when on his deck .