Newbie Help. New House Ceiling Speakers

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post #1 of 7

2/14/13 at 1:24pm

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I am new to the forums and have done a good bit of searching here for an answer to my question but could not find a clear one. I am moving into a new home for us and it has 7 existing ceiling speakers. 2 in family room, 2 in sun room, 2 outside and 1 in the master bath. All of these have separate volume controls already in place. They all go back to a wall plate with 8 (4 pairs of 2 outputs). My question is what receiver or amp can I use to power this without frying the receiver/amp?

Can I use an existing yamaha 575 watt 5.1 receiver or do I need to get something different.

I would like to play just background music from these speakers no surround sound.

Thanks.

post #2 of 7

2/14/13 at 1:57pm

Neurorad
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Pull out one of the volume controls, find the model number, and read the manual. Are they impedance matching? If they are, you can connect your speakers to 2 channels of any AVR. If they are not, then you would use an impedance matching speaker "selector" box between the AVR and speakers.

If you find the music from your speakers is not loud enough, you can use additional channels from that AVR. If still not adequate, buy a multichannel amp.

Speaker selector box is a misnomer; you never touch it to select anything. Zones are turned on and off at the VCs.

You need something in the signal chain to provide impedance matching, to avoid sending the amp into protect mode, or frying it.

post #3 of 7

2/14/13 at 6:24pm

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The volume controls are elan vs 100 II. It looks like they have impedance settings on them in 1x 2x 4x. Just curious if this would be OK to hook to a Yamaha 5.1 receiver or something different is needed.

post #4 of 7

2/14/13 at 9:18pm

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What Neurorad said... Since those are impedance-matching volume controls, you can just hook the output of the L/R channels of your Yamaha to all of them. You'll probably need to wire-nut some speaker cable jumpers to each of those wall plates and make one connection to the AVR (just 'cause 4 speaker wires will be difficult / impossible to connect directly).

post #5 of 7

2/14/13 at 9:32pm

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Would it hurt to hook up the center channel output to one of the inputs in addition to the l/r as well? I'm guessing the volume controls keep the speakers from frying the amp since they have impedance controls in them?

Thanks for the help just want to make sure I do it correctly.

post #6 of 7

2/14/13 at 10:30pm

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Center won't help much since it's only one channel... You could certainly use the surround channels to run one of the pairs, as long as your AVR has an "all channel stereo" mode so you get the same output on the surrounds as the front L/R.

The impedance matching is to compensate for connecting multiple pairs of speakers to one amp.

post #7 of 7

2/15/13 at 4:21am