Hi guys was hoping for a bit of help setting up a few of my receivers, im in the middle a gut and reno on an acreage i purchased and designing a home theatre/ setup up stairs using my existing equipment.
Long story shory i have three amps
1988 Kenwood kr v87r, i soldered in dip sockets and 0.1 ohm caps than popped in four lme 4562 op amps...it sounds excellent but this will be going into my home gym.
The other two amps i have are the onkyo sr 604 and my harmon kardon avr 1710. My setup downstairs will be a standard 5.1 with two subs which i was planning to use the onkyo for as i wanted to save the HK for upstairs. The onkyo appears to allow PCM (pre encoded lossless 5.1) to the receiver to play direct PCM which to my understanding is pretty much equivuilent to dolby hd or dts hd master...so i can pop in a blue ray into my xbox ans enjoy lossless surround. Am i missing anything with a newer receivers if im just watching movies?
Now on to my harmon kardon and why im saving it for upstairs. I will have a passive 3 channel soundbar (left, right, and center) mounted directly under the tv (compromise with wife), and on the adjacent wall i will have two bookshelf speakers facing the living room seating positions and the kitchen. Additionally i will have a subwoofer that will get shared between the two zones, the bookshelfs will be used for music only on the zone 2 of the harmon kardon. The harmon kardon has networking features that allow me to stream flac files from my network storage to zone 2. The onkyo on the other hand i could get an hdmi streaming device and use that upstairs instead, but appearently the onkyo's zone 2 only accepts analog inputs. There are no networkable DACs that are going to be cheap and still sound good that i have been able to find...the standard google chromecast uses analogue but i imagine it has a pretty poor built in DAC and wont sound the best. I am use to say... a cirrus logic 4348 DAC and find it has excellent quality.
At any rate back to my main question, am i missing out on anything by not using my harmon kardon downstairs for movies compared to my onkyo? If so is there any feasable way i can get my onkyo to work in the setup upstairs? A speaker A/B switch would fix the issue since music /soundbar would be played at different times but im afraid it will introduce unwanted impedence and degrade the sound quality of the music.
Long story shory i have three amps
1988 Kenwood kr v87r, i soldered in dip sockets and 0.1 ohm caps than popped in four lme 4562 op amps...it sounds excellent but this will be going into my home gym.
The other two amps i have are the onkyo sr 604 and my harmon kardon avr 1710. My setup downstairs will be a standard 5.1 with two subs which i was planning to use the onkyo for as i wanted to save the HK for upstairs. The onkyo appears to allow PCM (pre encoded lossless 5.1) to the receiver to play direct PCM which to my understanding is pretty much equivuilent to dolby hd or dts hd master...so i can pop in a blue ray into my xbox ans enjoy lossless surround. Am i missing anything with a newer receivers if im just watching movies?
Now on to my harmon kardon and why im saving it for upstairs. I will have a passive 3 channel soundbar (left, right, and center) mounted directly under the tv (compromise with wife), and on the adjacent wall i will have two bookshelf speakers facing the living room seating positions and the kitchen. Additionally i will have a subwoofer that will get shared between the two zones, the bookshelfs will be used for music only on the zone 2 of the harmon kardon. The harmon kardon has networking features that allow me to stream flac files from my network storage to zone 2. The onkyo on the other hand i could get an hdmi streaming device and use that upstairs instead, but appearently the onkyo's zone 2 only accepts analog inputs. There are no networkable DACs that are going to be cheap and still sound good that i have been able to find...the standard google chromecast uses analogue but i imagine it has a pretty poor built in DAC and wont sound the best. I am use to say... a cirrus logic 4348 DAC and find it has excellent quality.
At any rate back to my main question, am i missing out on anything by not using my harmon kardon downstairs for movies compared to my onkyo? If so is there any feasable way i can get my onkyo to work in the setup upstairs? A speaker A/B switch would fix the issue since music /soundbar would be played at different times but im afraid it will introduce unwanted impedence and degrade the sound quality of the music.
