QuestionI want to install surround sound in my living room; I also ran 4 pairs of speaker wires to the patio. My question is-- can I run both set of speakers off the same receiver? Can I use them simultaneously listening to different stations? If so what brand would you recommend and a ballpark price for the system.
Thanks in advance,
Jason
Answerthere are many different ways this can be done. There are recievers on the market known as "dual zone" recievers meaning you can put speakers in 2 locations. typcially they do not have 2 separate FM tuners in them if that's what you mean by listening to different stations, they'd be able to send 2 sources to 2 locations (cd to 1, radio to another) or (cd to 1, dvd to another) etc. so if you needed to send 2 different radio stations to 2 locations you would need to use the reicever built in radio for zone 1 and something else for zone 2 like a satelite radio that has line outputs going into the reciever, then you could select that satelite radio as a source and send it to zone 2. make sense? If you have digital cable, they usually have music channels so that may work for you. etc.
Now the other thing about dual zone reicevers is they typically do the 2nd zone in 1 of 2 ways.
Method 1 is zone 2 can be a line level output so you will need an amplifier to boost that line level up to speaker level where the zone 2 speakers are.
Method 2 is that us can assign a set of speaker outputs to be zone 2. In other words you have a 7.1 channel reciever which you can program those 7 speakers to be:
1 - front left zone1
2 - front right zone1
3 - center zone1
4 - surround left zone1
5 - surround right zone1
6 - back surround left zone1
7 - back surround right zone1
No zone 2
OR you can program it to be:
1 - front left zone1
2 - front right zone1
3 - center zone1
4 - surround left zone1
5 - surround right zone1
6 - left zone2
7 - right zone2
so the reciever has 7 channels and you can give some of them up in a surround sound setup to do other things (zone2).
A great reciever that can do EITHER of these 2 methods is the Onkyo TX-SR703 (or 803 if you need HDMI) seen here:
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-GI1VAm94jVd/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?wm=fp&I=580TXS703B...
if you look at the picture of the rear pannel of jacks there is a set there that says "zone 2 line out" this would go to an amplifier. (so you wouldnt have to give up any of the amps 7 built in amplifier channels)
If you didnt need all 7 of the amp channels you can assign the back surround speaker outputs to zone 2 in fact if you look there are separate speaker outputs for zone 2 but they are actually just 2 of the 7.1 channels. so you could have 7.1 surround when you dont need zone 2 and switch to 5.1 surround when you do need zone 2 without any wiring changes (done in the menu)
Let me know what you think.
