2. home-theater
  3. 1309982196

HT amp for my father - advice please

I never ventured into HT so I'm at a loss. My father has an older TV (will upgrade soon) and has 5 speakers (Sonus Faber concertino left/right, center and rears. He would like to use them for TV, DVDs and to run his dedicated imac loaded with music from itunes. PLUS...he is wired from the living room throughout the house including outside. Maybe 3 pairs of speakers not including his HT setup.

First thing...he needs an amp. He's thinking $5-600. How much pwr?

Recommendations please! I feel foolish I can't help him after all my years at audiogon. He likes simple and relatively inexpensive. I'm visiting him for 10 days so I'd like to get this rollling for him.

(oh, and hi to all my old audiogon friends.I haven't been around much lately!)
kublakhan

Showing 2 responses by dtc

dtc's avatar
dtc
1,047 posts
 
Outlaw Audio has the Marantz SR5005 for $500 with free shipping. It is a 7.1 receiver with zone 2, pre-outs, 100 watts per channel. I think you might still need to add external amps for best performance, but the Marantz might be a start.
dtc's avatar
dtc
1,047 posts
 
When you say $500 amp, do you mean a home theater receiver? If so, using its amps it is not going to do justice to the Concertino, although if he is just listening to mp3 music, it may not matter a lot. If these are the old Concertino bookshelves, they sold for $1K each. The new Domus floorstanders are even more.

If you just want an amp, then the ATI 150x is in your price range and has plenty of power.

Following on to what Mceljo said, in oder to drive the HT and the whole whole house from one receiver you need a 5.1/7.1 receiver with zone 2 capabilities. One with pre-outs will allow you to incorporate externals amps for the LRC and whole house.

One approach would be a receiver with pre-outs and zone 2 capabilities and an ATI 1505 amp. You could use 3 of the 5 channels on the ATI for LRC and 2 for whole house. The LRC would use the pre-outs of the receiver and the whole house would use zone 2 pre-outs. The surround speakers could then be driven from the receiver, as they are not as critical. Zone 2 lets you play whole house music separately from the HTsetup.

Hopefully the 3 sets of whole house speakers have impedence matching volume controls. If not, you probably need a impedence matching box. If so, those are mostly 4 ohm, so you need an amp that can drive 4 ohms.

Used receivers are OK, but you probably want one with HDMI inputs if he is every thinking of Blu-Ray.

Note that zone 2 typically requires analog inputs (receivers in this range can only decode one signal at a time). So, to use his iMAC with zone 2 he is going to have to run an analog cable from the iMAC to the receiver or have a separate DAC. He can use the headphone out jack (assuming is has one) although that means using the DAC in the iMac. Otherwise he needs a separate DAC.

Probably more than you wanted, but hopefully some of it is useful.
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