Ohm ratings (1 Viewer)

[Tammie N-S]

I am planning a home theater project (my first, so bear with the newbie question and want to set up a multi-zone system for a low budget.

But I want to make sure I don't blow up the (as yet unpurchased) receiver in the process.

I was thinking of getting a two-zone receiver and connecting the second zone to a speaker selector to split to four or six additional pairs of speakers.

The speaker selector that I found says it "works with all speakers rated 4ohm or above when using a 4ohm amplifier".

But when I look at a/v amplifiers (in my price range at least), they all say 8ohm. Is this a case where more is NOT better?

Thanks for any advice,
Tammie

 

[John Garcia]

There aren't many 4 Ohm capable receivers on the market, and as you may have found, the ones that are, aren't inexpensive. That's because these guys usually need to have a pretty hefty power supply to handle the lower impedance load. I'm working on a nearly identical setup as what you describe for a customer right now. The only way I can see to get it to work is to use the preamp outs to an external amp that is at least 4 Ohm stable. This way, all you need to have is a receiver that has pre-outs for zone 2, which most or all that have zone 2 should have.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Your "4 ohm" speaker selector should be fine. It wont damage things.

But you should watch for cheap speaker selectors that might combine several speakers to something that looks like a 6/4/2 ohm speaker to your reciever. This will damage things.

Some of the better selectors have writing that promise to never let your reciever "see" anything below 8 ohms even when you run 2/3/4 speakers at the same time. Look for this.

 

[EvanW]

One thing from experiance is if ur only driving 2 speakers with a surround receiver the surround receiver can do it pretty easily, Took a 0 ohm load to kill my Old teac and it only cost 200$ before that for about 4 years i had someone to driver 4ohms subs off it it clearly states that it should not drive speakers under 8ohms, if u can buy a pioneer VSX-1015-TX which is the same as the 1014 before it(had the 1014, one of the ones with the bad circuit boards... the 1015's dont have this probelm)these receivers are identical to the elite VSX-52TX that HT mag tested and it can easily drive 5 4ohm loads at full power. Most of the 8 ohm ratings are for "just to make sure" situations, but on the other hand i knew someone that while auditioning 4ohm speakers the store salesman blew the caps in a marantz surround receiver.