Page 1 of how to connect two amps to one set of rear speakers

how do i connect my 42inch tosh 5.1tv and my kenwood amp to one set rear speakers reason being so i can use just the tv and not use the amp to watch sky etc(i want to use the amp only for watching dvds) any help would be great

This item was edited on Wednesday, 28th August 2002, 12:05

without some sort of manual switch you risk massive damage....
Sorry,

Dave

Pardon me, but your question seems very unclear?!

If all you want to do is use your tv as a sound source for anything other than dvd`s, then just switch the amp off!!The Tosh tv`s have great surround speakers for watching tv, so unless you have some sort of life changing rear speakers i can`t really see what the difference will be.

Put simply, the complication of your desired idea far outweighs the practicality.The only other thing i can suggest is that if the tv has a 6ch output, wire just the rear speaker outputs into the rear channel analogue inputs on your Kenny amp, select 6ch IN on the amp and voila! Rear speakers only from the amp, but tv sound up front...

Even if you could manage it, the sonic balance between your tv speakers and the rear speakers would be very poor - just wire in the ones supplied with the tv - or simply fed the analogue stereo out on you rtv to the amp and do what the rest of us do and use the amp to listen to everything!!

Westy

Westy, I`m pretty sure he wanted to connect both his TV and his amp to a single set of shared rear speakers so he could run them either from his amp when watching DVDs or from his TV only when watching other stuff, which is why I said he couldn`t do it. I agree with your suggestion, just wire them up so the amp does everything and forget the amp in the TV.

Dave

You can use a speaker switch,
The idea is you connect 1 amp to 2 sets of speakers and switch between the two, but they can be used the other way around. you can get them from http://www.cpc.co.uk or http://www.maplins.co.uk for about a tenner.

Make sure you get one that doesn`t have and a+b position on the switch, idea of that is to have both sets of speakers running at same time, but in your case it would mean having both tv and amp running the speakers which would probably end up in either tv or amp going bang!!!

Gerald, thanks, I think this is the answer to a similar question I posed sometime ago. My question was can I connect my Dolby Pro Logic TV to my DVD 5.1 Home cinema box? The answer at that time was `no, you will blow your tv/amp up`. At the moment I have all six speakers conected to the DVD amp, my question was can I somehow run speaker cables from the rear speaker out spring clips from the back of my TV into the rear speaker connectors on the back of the DVD amp. The reason being that I could then ultilize the all ready in place rear speakers using my TV`s Dolby Pro Logic function without turning on the DVD unit and switching over to AUX etc etc.

Yey, I helped someone.

You should be ok in doing that, you just have to keep getting up and switching from input a to input b or vise versa.
Other thing to check is the resistance of the speakers, some TV surround speakers are 16 ohm but normal home speakers are 8 ohm, so if you connect an 8 ohm speaker to your 16 ohm tv it will draw twice as much power from the internal amplifier which are only very small so may not be worth the risk or if you do try it, keep the volume low.

This item was edited on Friday, 30th August 2002, 15:04

Yes, a manual switch should do the job fine, the question is why would you want to? Why not save yourself the additional expense and use your amplifier and an auxilary input (assuming you have one of course) to do the switching. Then you can do it from the remote.

Dave

Dave, I have 2 Aux inputs my DVD amp which can decode DPL, but that would mean leaving on the DVD player all the time. I usually only use the Aux setting when watching Sky movies or a video with a DPL sound track. I thought it would be useful it be able to have the all ready in place rear speakers working all the time when the TV is switched on, because not all TV programmes are flagged as being Dolby Pro Logic.

Terry