tca, before you wrote this, I was sure that everyone was talking about taking a Zone 2 output, NOT a line out from the main receiver as you proposed. When you say what if, gee, it's almost as if you've discovered that there's a Zone 2 output and are saying "hey, what if we use this, guys?"
On September 30, 2007 at 16:48, tca said...
Here is another dilemma.. If you connect a line out from
the main home theater a/v receiver to an amp...you can
only listen to what is currently on
the main home theater a/v receiver!
Well, if you did that, you wouldn't be doing what ANY of us are talking about, and I thought that included you!
... What
if, however, you take either the pre-out of zone 2 on
the main a/v receiver, or the actual left/right speaker
outs of zone 2 from the main a/v receiver, and then connect
this to the amp?
The Zone 2 line outputs are the thing to use. And they call them Zone 2 because they can choose things different from Zone 1, which is the Home Theater Zone. I know, I know, nobody can find the term "Zone 1" in a manual, but if they have a Zone 2, the main section has to be Zone 1.
I am guessing that this will allow you
to safely play zone 2, which can be another source, amplified
throughout the whole home.
Now you're with us (which I thought you were all along). But I just reread your previous posts and I see you don't specify whether the output you're taking is from the main zone or the second zone. I ASS UMEd you were talking second zone. After all, the original poster says 2nd zone on the fourth line of the first post.
I wouldn't take the second zone output from its speaker terminals, though. That won't hurt the A/V receiver. The issue is that if the second zone amp can put out 100 watts into 8 ohms, it can put out 28 volts at maximum volume, with some very low noise level. You can indeed take this signal an run it into a power amp, and as long as you never go above about a volt, you won't overdrive the amp. But there's that pesky noise level to deal with. If you take the amp output and drop it using a resistive network by a factor of, let's say ten, then the maximum that will go into the power amp will be 2.8 volts. That's still enough to way overdrive that amp, but in the process of dropping the zone 2 amp's output level, you've also dropped the noise by a factor of ten. If you don't know how to design a resistive network to do this, just use the freakin' RCA jacks that they put on the unit for this purpose. Only put a power amp output into a different power amp's input if you know how to safely scale the signal for voltage and impedance.
