How Do I Build A Htpc Using Most Of What I Have

[Guest udoshia]

I finally built a computer from what was laying around the house thanks to the encouragement of you guys. I bought a new lian li full tower case and in that I have a

gigabyte k8ns 939 ultra

AMD 64 3500

geforce 6800 ultra

2 gigs of ballistix mem by crucial

audigy gamer sound

2 rapters on raid 0

for temps digitaldoc5+ and everything runs from 76 to 100 F and thats with so many fans I feel like there is a typhoon in the room

Anyway, I digress,

the pc that I want to make a HTPC is the one from the spare parts. It has a modded by me aopenhxo8 (very proud)

asus k7v333

AMD 1.4 athlon

xtasy 9600 256

1 gig of pny memory 3200

2 old hard drives but tried and true 1, 50 gb IBM 1, 60 gb maxtor

creative 16 bit 5.1 mp3

I know I need a sound card and the blue gears sounds good. I need a tv tuner but my question is

do I need to hookup a external amp to run the speakers in the 3 rooms with speakers?How do I do this? I am now running It with a Harman Kardon 430 but there isn't enough power for 6 pr of speakers. I am using a speaker selector. I checked whole house amps and you're talking $1000 to start with. Not to mention another 300.00 for a good speaker selector.

[hardnrg]

6 pairs of speakers? so 12 speakers in total?

 

i'd personally put an amp in each room... not sure why you'd want to turn the sound on/off from another room anyway?

 

you could run 4 identical speakers from a single channel of an amp like this:

 

      Left channel (+)
            |
            |
            |
   o--------o----------o
   |                   |
   |                   |
   |  (+)          (+) |              1/R = 1/8 + 1/8
[speaker 1]         [speaker 2]            = 1/4
   |  (-)          (-) |
   |                   |                R = 4 ohms
   |                   |
   o--------o----------o
            |
            |                              AND
            |
   o--------o----------o
   |                   |
   |                   |
   |  (+)          (+) |              1/R = 1/8 + 1/8
[speaker 3]         [speaker 4]            = 1/4
   |  (-)          (-) |
   |                   |                R = 4 ohms
   |                   |
   o--------o----------o
            |
            |                             
            |                              IS 8 ohms total
     Left channel (-)

[Guest udoshia]

6 pairs of speakers? so 12 speakers in total?

 

i'd personally put an amp in each room... not sure why you'd want to turn the sound on/off from another room anyway?

 

you could run 4 identical speakers from a single channel of an amp like this:

 

[hardnrg]

how many speakers do you have in each room?

[Guest udoshia]

how many speakers do you have in each room?

502088[/snapback]

4 IN ONE ROOM 4 IN amother AND 2 IN ANOTHER.

What I want to do is turn on or off rooms. I have the harman Kardon in one of the rooms with 4 speakers and so that leaves 2 rooms one with 4 and one with 2. What I want to be able to do is have all the rooms playing the same thing. Be able to turn off a room or 2. I also would like to put music on the pc and play it from the hard drive. Is this even possible. Are we talking $400.00 or more for each amp? I already spent 800.00 on the Harman Kardon.

[GuJuMaN89]

u could get a splitter, but what would be more better is getting a big amp that can support all those speakers :/

[hardnrg]

that amp supports multiroom (page 39 in the manual i think) so you can control the stereo room easily... you could use the powered multiroom Left and Right for that room (SBR/MultiR, SBL/MultiL)... no amp required, powered from the spare (unused) outputs from your HK amp... so you'd need some speaker wire

 

then for the room with 4 you could use the multiroom line-level outputs (Multi:L/R out) and take a long phono(rca) interconnect to an amp in the 4 speaker room...

 

alternatively you could get this thing

http://www.harmankardon.com/product_detail...ACC&prod=AB%201

which gives you an amplified pair in another room from your amp...

[Guest udoshia]

that amp supports multiroom (page 39 in the manual i think) so you can control the stereo room easily... you could use the powered multiroom Left and Right for that room (SBR/MultiR, SBL/MultiL)... no amp required, powered from the spare (unused) outputs from your HK amp... so you'd need some speaker wire

 

then for the room with 4 you could use the multiroom line-level outputs (Multi:L/R out) and take a long phono(rca) interconnect to an amp in the 4 speaker room...

 

alternatively you could get this thing

http://www.harmankardon.com/product_detail...ACC&prod=AB%201

which gives you an amplified pair in another room from your amp...

502418[/snapback]

 

 

Thanx so much.

When I got the amp I asked a home theatre company here in Phoenix about that very product and they said it wouldn't work. Thats what I'll do. You saved me alot of money. Now I can concentrate on replaceing some of the not so great speaker pairs to good in wall speakers. I've been reading about htpc's on the internet and I have a better understanding now.