Need help designing HT setup

Dropped a bunch of money on a Luxman MX-100 300W AMP and and a pair of Tsi-200 Polk speakers, I have had them for almost a month now and they still are not hooked up

Only room that will handle this kind of power is the living room. Problem is I have having trouble integrating it into the existing HT setup.

I have 2 HT receivers available. a Onkyo HT-R340 receiver (and speakers)

and a Sony STR-DE697 unit with speakers



the sony is missing the surround channel speakers, so my thinking was to take the L/R and flip them out to surround duty. pop in the polks and away we go.

Porblem though.

The Sub for the sony (ks-201HT) gets its signal from the L/R channels of the receiver. While there is a RCA coax output for sub... I do not see how I can make this work.


My questions mainly involve RCA to "speaker wire"

1) Can I run the L/R output via speaker wire to an RCA adapter for input to the Luxman amp. I can dial down the output of the HT receiever to decrease distoration and give the luxman a cleaner signal to amplify (I have no preouts on this HT receiver)

2) The sub has stereo input and stereo output to the L/R channels. I tried removing the plate to see how it was wired to the sub, but it appears to be glued as well as screwed on. Since I can not see how it is wired, I assume that means it is a crossover sub, but can not be sure. Can I take an RCA cable to the sub output on the receiver and just split the cable and put it into the speaker ports?


I am assuming that RCA to speaker wire will need some type of impedence control since coax is 75ohm and the speakers are all 8 ohm. Much like a balun to convert 300ohm antenna signal to 75ohm for your TV.


the only other option I see right now involves running analog surround out of the HTPC, to the receiver, keeping L/R seperate straight to the Luxman and the polks. But then I lose line conditioning and although the HTPC does not get powered off very often, with kids in the house the last thing I want is 150W per channel POP running through the polks. This also has the drawback of not using the sub woofer.

Any tips?

http://s167.photobucket.com/albums/u153/cyber42punk/OCF/?action=view&current=100_3319.jpg

Are the "audio out" rca ports for video1 unamped? Can I run digital audio to the receiver, then use video1 audio output to send signal to the Luxmann amp? Or would I have to use RCA analog input?

Ugh, really out of my league here.

Start at the beginning.. You want to run... 5.1? With the Polks as fronts powered by their own 2 channel amp, and some other speakers as surrounds and center powered by the Sony or Onkyo? The Onkyo doesn't have a preamp/sub out, just the amplified subout channel. You can use it in the high level inputs on your sub, no problem. It'd be much easier to use the Sony though. It appears to have both a low level sub output, and a preamp output to send to the Luxman.

Really, it's just gonna be a big pain in the butt to use 2 amps for a single setup. Volume matching will drive you batty. I'd either run the whole system off the Sony, and sell the Luxman, or run 2 seperate systems - Luxman plus Polks for 2 channel music, and Sony or Onkyo with your other speakers for surround...

edit: Yeah, the L/R outputs on the Video 1 section should be preamp on the Onkyo. You could send that signal to the Luxman and just run the sub off the amped outputs if you wanted. Like I said though, volume matching is gonna be a pain.

Yah I wondered about volume matching as well.

Sony is a pain to use because the sub gets signal from L/R channels. Otherwise It might be doable.


I picked up the polks just because music sucks on a surround system (but games and movies rock!) Dom gave me a real good deal on the amp so I took that too. Never had a power amp before so I did not know what I was gettign into.

Eventually I would like to build a nice overall setup but for now I was just looking at making use of this setup.

Going to hit Home depot today and see if I can figure out the wall mount portion of these speaker hangers and get them hung. Will do the video1 out to the luxman and tool around with that sometime this week.

Summers coming and we have people over so a nice audio setup will be important

Thanks RB




Running the polks off of the sony, is not really an option unless I can power the sub off something other than the L/R channels.

It is a KS-201HT and I gave a 2 minute attempt at dissassembling it to find out if it actually received signal from only one of the channels (so I could use the coax RCA output on the sony to power the sub with a little modification) but hte backpanel appears to be screwed and glued on.

Okay done a little more reading, and it seems the RCA subwoofer output on the Sony is meant to be used with a powered sub.

After I am done playing with my new CPU, I will test out running the sub off of the center channel and hooking up the polks directly to the sony.

If that does not work I will just use them as B channel speakers, maybe at some other time I can use the Luxman amp.