[wilsonparson]

Hi all,

My wife and I just moved into our newly built home, and when it was framed we wired for ceiling speakers. In our main room we wired the traditional 4 rear surround speakers for a 7.1 system (i.e., left-surround, back-left-surround, right-surround, and back-right-surround), but we also wired for two additional speakers back in the kitchen (see the attached sketch).

My question is the following: with a 7.2 receiver (Sony STR-DH790), what is the best way to set up a speaker selector so that we could have all 9 speakers play when we want to play music in the house? In addition, we'd love to set it up so that someone in the kitchen could listen to a movie/show playing, probably by splitting the left, center, or right channels so they can hear dialogue. I'm new to this, so I'd love your help with the following things:

- What type of speaker selector should I use?
- Is it advisable to split any of the front three channels, so that people in the kitchen can here the more important channels (as opposed to surround channels)?

Finally, I forgot to add this to the sketch, but we actually have one more speaker cable running through the wall out the ceiling in the garage that we could hook up to the receiver/selector. We wouldn't need this for movies--just occasional music listening if we're working in the garage.

Thank you in advance for your help!

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

It’s the center channel info you’d want in the kitchen, in order to hear dialogue. I’m not sure that loading up three speakers on a single channel of a budget receiver is a good idea. You need a receiver with a line-level center-channel output that would allow you to use an outboard amplifier for the kitchen / dining room speakers.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[RayGuy]

Use zone 2, zone 3, on the receiver, with separate zone amplifiers for your whole house requirements. AudioSource, Dayton Audio, Monoprice, RussSound, lots of other options.