How to Get MORE Power From Your AV Receiver

mr t script 30 says i just purchased a 7 channel amplifier but my receiver is a 9 channel which are height channels can those unamplified channels draw more power since the other 7 channels will be amplified now this is a great question most of you guys are probably running your entire home theater with an avr and av receiver and so you may have five speakers seven speakers in this case you've got nine speakers that are being powered by this avr so the question is if he were to add a seven channel amplifier to this system would the remaining two speakers that are being driven by the avr would those receive more power and the answer is yes and here's what i want you to think about most receivers like denon marantz yamaha typically if you go on their website and you pull up any one of their models and if you look at the specs you're going to see a spec that says something like 110 watts by two that means two speakers driven typically you want to see something that's 20 hertz to 20 000 hertz sometimes they they have a different measurement there and that throws it all out of whack but that's really what you're looking for so let's just say for instance you're looking at a denon receiver and it's a hundred and ten by two okay so if you hook up just two speakers you're gonna get pretty much 110 watts for each one of those speakers but let's say you're expanding your home theater and so you've bought a center channel and two side surrounds now you're running a 5.1 you're running five speakers two up front one in the center and two on the sides and a point one which is your subwoofer that's not powered by the avr it usually has a built-in amplifier on it so that's really not taking into consideration what it's drawing from the avr so now you have five speakers that are being driven by an avr and that avr is pushing out 110 watts per channel but only to two speakers so what happens when you add those three additional speakers the center channel and two side surrounds well that amount of amplification that normally was going to those two speakers are now being divided kind of amongst those five speakers and so you're going to get less wattage per speaker so that receiver may now be pushing let's say instead of 110 by two it might drop down to say 90 watts or even 80 or 85 watts to five speakers so once again you're adding more speakers you're wanting to get a more enveloping sound and so you add two more surround back speakers so now you're talking about a 7.1 system you've got seven bed layer speakers three up front two side surrounds and two back surrounds and then your 0.1 for your subwoofer so now instead of that 85 or maybe even 90 watts per channel you're getting even less wattage so maybe let's say that dropped down to 65 watts a channel and then later on you're like you know what i want to add some atmos and maybe you add two atmos speakers so now you're up to a 9.1 system you've got nine speakers seven bed layer and two atmos or maybe you've got five bed layer and four dolby atmos speakers in your ceiling or maybe maybe even height speakers so you've got nine speakers that that one power supply that is inside that avr is having to power all nine of those speakers and so every time you add a pair of speakers it gets lower and lower and lower i'll give you a personal example a long time ago i've had my theater room now for about 14 years somewhere at the beginning of that stage of building out my home theater probably in like year two or three i had a yamaha rxv 1800 and i believe it was like 140 watts per channel well i had at that time i had five speakers and i didn't have atmos i just had five speakers and a subwoofer and it performed amazing man i loved it i could crank it up no distortion it would reach reference volume with no problem without an external amplifier but i found a really really good youth man deal on a set of bookshelf speakers and i added those as my surround back so now i went from a 5.1 three speakers up front two side surrounds to a 7.1 so i added two surround back speakers as soon as i did that something drastically changed it was really bizarre i found myself having to crank up the receiver a lot more than normal as far as my volume and at the time i didn't understand this concept of what was going on but i would crank it up even more and even when i got to about the same volume it never really sounded right it was almost sounded like the receiver was just running out of gas like it was running out on fumes and i think that's an initially what was happening it didn't have enough power supply to effectively drive seven speakers and i didn't understand that concept until i began to do a little research on that receiver and i pulled up some bench testing some like benchmark testing from i believe it was sound and vision and in their documentation they were able to they had equipment that they could measure how much output that avr was producing when you add more and more speakers and i don't remember the exact specs but it basically just what i told you it started out 140 by two and they tested it with three speakers and then five speakers by the time they got to seven speakers the avr was only producing 55 watts per channel and it just wasn't enough and so when you're able to add an external amplifier and the only way you can do that is if your avr has what they call pre-outs on the back of your receiver you'll see something that says pre-outs and it'll say left and right pre-out center pre-out surround pre-out surround back pre-out those are rca connections that you can use to connect to an external amplifier and then from that amplifier to those speakers and so to get back to the initial question if we were to offload seven out of the nine speakers to an external amplifier and just let that amplifier handle those seven speakers can the avr will that give it more power to power the those remaining two speakers and the answer is yes because it's just the opposite when you start taking off um speakers from an avr it's going to provide more power to those speakers that are connected to the avr and so how would this be like a practical solution so here's the deal if you've got let's say again seven speakers nine speakers 11 speakers in my situation i've got 11 speakers and i have an 11 channel amp and i love it it's a monolith 11x but the reality is i could buy a 3 channel amplifier and just power let's say my front lcr my left my center and my right with that amplifier and then i could allow my in my case i can't do it because i've got a processor and it doesn't have any internal amplification but let's say i had an avr i could let the avr power the remaining speakers okay so that'd be like another what eight speakers that it would be powering and so that would alleviate some of that weight from the avr so it could perform you know a lot better more efficiently and then the other thing is you know again you could do a five channel amplifier same thing maybe you want to power your bed layer with an amplifier an external amplifier and let the internal amplifier on your avr power maybe your surround backs or your atmos speakers and so again a lot of guys have some you know some ideas of what they want to do a lot of it depends on your budget if you can't afford an 11 channel amplifier and you feel that you need more amplification maybe just offload some of your power to an external amplifier now in a past video i reviewed some very budget-friendly amplifiers from imativa it's from their basic series and what's really cool about that series is they have a two channel they've got a three channel a four channel a five channel a six channel and a seven channel amplifier and so you can kind of figure out how much of the the power how many speakers do you want to offload from your avr to those speakers and so if you're running out of gas with your avr adding an external amplifier could be the ticket now if you're interested in one of emativa's budget-friendly amplifiers i'll have links to those down in the description of this video you can also check out my review of the basics a3 amplifier and if you're interested in winning up to 30 thousand dollars in free gear we are on the road to 100 000 subscribers check out this video here and as always you guys be blessed and we'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Youthman

Views: 62,007

Keywords: Home Theater, Youthman, Home Cinema, Dolby Atmos, 4K, HDR, Dolby, AVR, AV Receiver, Denon, Marantz, Yamaha, Amplifier, Emotiva, Monolith, Monoprice

Id: Oym-t4rCvJQ

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022