[bluejay]

We have been using our new receiver for about a week now. It is a Yamaha HTR 6160, (same as a 663). Before hooking it up, I needed to rearrange the living room. I wanted 6 good speakers to hook up to and a proper place to put them. I built a wooden shelf unit to hold the DVD's plus rear surrounds. I actually gutted a pair of small speakers I had in storage because they were toast. I refinished them and installed new 4" drivers as rear surrounds. As part of the same driver order I acquired two 3" drivers as well. I installed these in our Cerwin Vega D9's. The tweeters had failed in these a long time ago. It may have had something to do with a small child cranking the amp up full by accident.

I made sure to order additional cables, wire, banana plugs, etc. I methodically hooked it all up, taking care that everything was unplugged. I'm pretty sure all the speaker phasing is correct. Well it turned out to be plug and play, no smoke when I flipped the switch. Every day or so a new tweak or two gets handled.

Last evening, brother salvasol, mentioned in another thread, that he had taken the load off his receiver by connecting an additional amplifier. It just so happens I have our old amp sitting around, a 2 x 100 watt Yamaha. I had checked the heat emanating from the receiver a few times before, but did not really pay much attention. I decided to watch Transformers again, this time a bit louder, like at the theater. I did note significant heat exchange happening. It was in no way too much heat, but enough to think "hey why not share the load."

Today I connected the surround channels pre outs to the amp. This takes the load of two D9's off the receiver. Then to test I watched the Bourne Ultimatum, volume up. I'd say the receiver was 1/2 as warm. It really worked fine. The amp transformer is pretty big, the thing is heavy, and just warms up to a nice working temperature at 1/2 volume. I get to use the old gear and it looks cool to have more stuff running. It kind of suits my temperament too, a bit like cruising along with the V8 at 1,500 rpm. It might last longer than a 4 doing 2,500. (Don't flame me, I've had lots of 4's and like them too.) :surrender:


So thanks salvasol, you da man. :thumb:

 

[salvasol]

I'm glad it worked for you :T.

Today I connected the surround channels pre outs to the amp. This takes the load of two D9's off the receiver.

Try using the stereo amp to power the front speakers, they demand a lot more power than the surrounds :yes: ....

 

[bluejay]

Try using the stereo amp to power the front speakers, they demand a lot more power than the surrounds ....

Yes I remember that was your instructions. I strayed from it a bit because the fronts are the most important speakers, and I like to have good volume control over them.

When I crank up the volume with the remote, the receiver goes up digitally, where the amp knob turns by motor. If I am cranking up from quiet to loud in one big sweep, they track equally, almost perfect. If I just crank up a bit 2 or 3 times or down a couple of times, they soon go out of sync. Usually the surrounds go up a bit more each time, a bit like a flywheel effect.

In my setup, I found the default settings for the rears and surrounds to be too quiet. I tried the auto setup too and it was still too quiet to my ear. I am finding I like it better with both of these adjusted up nearly full. I have the side surrounds set to large so that isn't the issue. My thinking for now is the surrounds may be quite a bit less efficient than the fronts. The amp can drive them up where I like and I can keep cranking them if I want to without affecting the front volume.

I understand connecting the fronts would give the receiver more of a "rest" but I have not found it needing that much of a rest yet. As I mentioned, the heat has cut in half, so that is quite a bit really. I have ordered a driver for a home built sub. Then I will be sending the lows to sub instead of to the fronts like now. I am glad I have enough rack space for a third amp. :rofl: