I have a client with a very large garage. One side of it has a man cave run through a Marantz preamp, amplifier combo. It has the TV etc. That system has a five channel amplifier. Currently only two channels of it are being used. We may put a centre channel on it later. The other two channels were to be used for future rear speakers obviously. We were going to add a small two channel amplifier for two outdoor speakers in zone three that don't need a lot of power. Zone two is about to be set up with two big JBL pro audio speakers running off of a crown CDI 2000 and an 18" woofer run off of an XLS 2502. This will be to provide loud sound for the garage versus the quieter but really high-quality that the current system has.

The two JBL speakers, while about 30 feet behind the listening area, are in a good place to act as rear speakers. I had a thought that I could run the pre-out from the rear speakers and the pre out from zone two into a switcher that would be triggered by one of the 12 V triggers on the Pre-amp. The amplifier would default to the rear pre out but when zone two is activated switch to the zone two per-out.

There is no good place in the listening area for the rear speakers to go. This solves that issue, and this way I could re-purposed two of the channels on the five channel amp to power the outdoor speakers. The power output to the JBL speakers is way overkill for rear speakers of course but the level would be dictated by the settings for the rears in the preamp. Just because they can be offensively loud doesn't mean they have to be.

In my opinion it's no different than using something like a Niles Amp with an auto switching input. Just on a larger scale.

What are your thoughts? Any input is appreciated.

Thanks, Craig.