I have a new home with a pre wired 7 speaker surround sound system room. I also have two pair of speaker wires running to every room and a few sets outside. I have my DVD, Directv, CD, and other components wired into the system through optical and rca adapters.
Initially i purchased a cheap sony 80 watt integrated preamp/amp aurround sound system with output to speakers groups A and B. I wired my home theater speakers to speakers A, which is a 7 channel output and then I wired the B 2 channel output to a speaker selector/splitter/balancer to pump sound into about 6 sets of speakers. This all works pretty good with the exception of some clipping on speakers that are passive and over 200 feet of cable (small problem). Also, i know i am stressing the little 80 watt amp, but i bought it as a throw away until i could afford better.
I'm ready to start upgrading. The first thing I want to do is upgrade to a separate preamp and amp system. I am interested in the Outlaw 990 preamp but have a dilema now in sustaining basically two sound systems from the same inputs if possible (I like listening to XM sattelite of Direct TV). I have found nice 2 channel concert hall like 800-2500 watt amplifiers (Mackie) for the room and outdoor speakers and I like the 7 channel amps outlaw sells for the home theater room.
My dilema is how can I feed both amplifiers from from a single 990? The Mackies I am looking at have simply two channels input (balanced and unbalanced) and two high powered outputs to pump enough juice to distant speakers without clipping (at least that's my theory).
The only solution I can think of is to feed the 7 balanced outputs from the 990 to some kind of a splitter box (sorry, not failiar with what these boxes might be named) and switch from one amp to the next as required (won't need both systems active at the same time). Not sure it's the most elegant solution, so I thought I'd ask the experts.
Ideally I would like for both amps to be playing the same sound at the same time for full house effect.
I think I answered my own question by reading more postings and connecting the dots. Looks like you can hook up two amps (one to 7 channel balanced) and one to the right and left channels of the unbalanced output. I was unaware these outputs could both be active. Looks like outlaw also allows multi zoning to i can pipe a different input to each set of speakers.