Help in Hooking Up my Home Theater (1 Viewer)

[Jason Rosoff]

I just moved into a new home. I had an option of adding speakers into rooms other than the room where my home theater will be, and I took it. The purpose of the additional speakers was so that we can listen to continous music throughout the house and outside.

Here is the problem: The speakers are in THREE other rooms (three sets of wires) and I only have one space on the back of my reciever to hook up "B" speakers. How do I go about hooking up these up?

I would like to hook them up as "B" speakers so that I can turn them on and off when I would like.

Further, these speaker wires are run to the point in my house where my home theater will be, however it barely extends out of the wall (like wiring would be if you were to install a jack on the wall). Can you splice additional speaker wire, twist it to the wire within the wall and extend it to where I need it to reach? Or is there another option?

 

[Bill Catherall]

How many speakers in each room? What is the ohm rating of each speaker (2, 4, 6, 8 ohms)? I'm going to assume you have just a stereo pair in each room. Normally you can't hook up 3 speakers to one speaker terminal on a receiver. But if the speakers are rated at 2 ohms you could hook them up in series and make it an effective 6 ohm load to each stereo channel on the receiver. If they are 8 ohm speakers then you might kill the receiver doing that. The other option is to get a multiroom amplifier that has enough channels (at least 6 in this case) to drive all the speakers. You won't need much power since it's just back ground listening...30-50 watts per channel at the most.

 

[Kendal Kirk]

You could use this http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showd...15940&CATID=43 . If you wanted to control the volume in the room that they will be connected in you could run wire from the selector to http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showd...9434&CATID=43.
I have not done this before, but www.partsexpress.com has a lot of products that may be what you are looking for.
Lots of luck . . .

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Jason,

First, Welcome to the Forum!

Bill and Kendal both had good advice. This is too many speakers to connect to most any amplifier at once. The simplest and cheapest way to accomplish your project is to get a speaker selector like Kendal recommended. It would connect to your receiver’s “B” terminals. All the speakers would connect to the speaker selector, and which would give independent switching to the three speaker sets. In-wall volume controls could give local adjustments, again, as Kendal noted. I know Radio Shack sells speaker selectors and wall volume controls that are cheaper than the ones on the Parts Express links.

However, an even better solution (but more expensive) would be to drive the extra speakers with an outboard multi-channel amp, like Bill recommended. The reason: Although a speaker selector properly “loads” the receiver’s amplifiers so as to prevent a “melt down,” the receiver nevertheless works harder to drive all the speakers. You will probably notice the receiver has to be set at a higher volume setting when driving the extra speakers than you would see if it was driving only the main speakers at a comparable volume. Thus the amp works harder, which will ultimately shorten its life.

In all fairness, though, if you’re like most of us, you will probably upgrade long before you would wear out the receiver.

Happy Holidays,

Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Jason Rosoff]

Thank you all very much for your help. I will look into all the options mentioned and will have to invite you all over for the house warming party!!!

Thanks again.