We’ve recently had a customer question how to use the speakers in their home theater setup with AmpliPro as well while keeping the theater intact, the answer we came to was getting automatic speaker source switches, a device that listens across multiple inputs for audio and only outputs audio from the first one to send audio to the switch; something like this
Does anyone have any experience with automatic switches like these? Are there any particularly good ones you’d suggest, are there any bad ones to avoid? Are there inherent problems with a device like this that users should be aware of? Let us know!
I don’t have experience with an automatic switch, however the way I handled this scenario was to use the RCA output on the AmpilPi to feed the Home Theater’s Receiver to power that specific zone. It works great.
That was my first thought as well, though after internal talks we decided that could reduce the quality of some theater setups.
Between potentially having to run wires at lossy lengths to get to and from the unit, and the unit only supporting two channel audio (which could negate surround sound setups) we came across the switch to avoid those issues.
That’s not to say it’s ALWAYS a negative; it’s very situational. If it works for you then that’s great!
I ran the speaker wire to the Receiver’s AMP, and the RCA from the AmpliPi to an audio input on the receiver, that way the Receiver was in charge of the audio, no loss that way on the theater side. There could be some loss from the RCA going from the AmpliPi to the Receiver, but since that’s just the whole home music that I run at lower volume than movies in the Home Theater I thought that was a reasonable trade off.
When I looked into the idea of using the automatic switches, the price was way too high to power multiple sets of ceiling speakers, so that was a major factor in doing it the way I did.
Curious, did you end up trying this out? I also have a room with theater speakers that would be a bit silly to run two specific speakers just for AmpliPi but this could utilize the ones already there
Yeah, it works great, used it for years at my old house and am in the process of wiring it up again the same way in the new house.
I used a simple RCA Balun over Cat5e to carry the audio to the receiver and have zero complaints.
It does help when using something like Home Assistant to automate switching inputs on the receiver. i.e. TV turns off, flip the input to the RCA from the AmpliPi.
But that is a good point, just could leave it on RCA mode on the Home Theater receiver when not in use or watching anything and use one of the pre-out on the AmpliPi to go to that home theater for that one zone