# multi room speaker setup help



## promisland (Jun 24, 2011)

Hi all,

Firstly please excuse my obvious lack of knowledge as I am still very uneducated in the world of audio...

Anyway, I am looking for some advice in setting up a three room sound system with a reciever in the middle room and a pair of speakers in each of the three rooms (three pairs total). I have been planning on connecting a stereo receiver to the three pairs of speakers with some sort of impedence matching and also volume controls, but I recently read some contradictory info on sound quality when using an impedence matching setup and have not been able to find out any more info. I'm not talking any audiophile-esque issues here but i basically want to make sure I am chosing a "decent" setup for my new Klipsch RF 52 II's ($700 to give an idea).

Does anyone here happen to have any insight or experience with these kinds of setups? I am wondering if I might be better off getting a 5.1 reciever to give the Klipsch speakers in the main room their own channels and then connecting the other two rooms off the surround channels with impedence matching (since I don't care as much about sound quality of the bookshelf speakers in the other rooms). Does that make any sense at all? Any thoughts?


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## robbo266317 (Sep 22, 2008)

Welcome to Home Theatre Shack.

Most of the surround receivers have outputs to run a second room and usually can be set to a different input source to the main listening area. 
Are you talking about running the other rooms together off the same input source e.g. both listen to radio or cd? 
Also, for "impedance matching" are you referring to 70 Volt step up transformers?

Cheers,
Bill.


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## promisland (Jun 24, 2011)

Thanks for the reply. To answer your question, I am trying to run one source in three rooms (with three volume controls). 

The impedence matching I am talking about is built into some volume controls or switchboxes and allows you to connect multiple speakers in parallel to a single amp terminal by adding extra impedence at each of the speakers to keep the amplifier's load at 8 ohm for example (if not the parallel circuit would reduce the load). I can't post a link since I don't yet have 5 posts but there are some on crutchfield's website.

Doing a little reading of the specs on these things I think I am going to avoid it for my main speakers and use a 5.1 system. My question now is, does anyone know if there is any disadvantage to powering my good speakers off of the surround channels of a 5.1 system, I would need to configure it this way since the two pairs of speakers can only run off of the front channel for some reason, according to alot of the 5.1 product manuals.


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