Hi everyone,

We're moving house to a place that is configured for "whole-house audio". Each room has two speakers in the ceiling and a wall-mounted volume control. The speaker wires all end in a big bundle in the living room area. I doubt this system sounds good, but my SO would like to have it hooked up for background noise and so she can play the empeg throughout the house.

My question is -- since impedance drops when you wire speakers in parallel, it seems to me that you can't just connect all of these speaker pairs to my stereo amplifier outputs. So, how are these systems typically configured? How do I actually set this up? Do I need some kind of special amplifer or can I use one of the ones I have (I have two high-power "mid-fi" amps, a Bryston and a Carver TFM (which I'm not currently using)).

I'd prefer to have a nice, clean signal from the Bryston to my main pair of B&W speakers and use the second amp for the whole-house audio (unless this is a silly concern). In that case, however, what's the best way for me to run the line-level preamp output to (potentially) two different power amps?

Thanks in advance, guys!

Jim

I'd use a decent zone amplifier, for example this Crown 660A.

Thanks, Andy.

What's the best way to split the line-level inputs to the two different amps? Does that Crown include an input selector for each zone? It doesn't appear to. Also, the Crown takes a "Phoenix-style" input, while my stuff is all RCA connectors. I'm assuming I can get an adapter for that, right?

I don't really understand how to hook all this up so that both systems can run off of the same sources...

Sorry for my confusion.

Jim

The amp is effectively a discreet 6 channel amplifier. At its simplest, you could just parallel your source across all 6 inputs, or you could be swish and put a small mixer/router in so you could route different sources to different speakers, you could have the empeg on in one room and the radio in another.

You could either buy adaptor cables or simply make them up by chopping RCA cables in half and screwing the bare ends into the phoenix connectors.