Video Asylum

Posted by chris e. on June 22, 2000 at 08:23:49:

In Reply to: Help - I have two seperate systems posted by fergy on June 17, 2000 at 22:04:16:

Listen to someone with similar room limitation (1 room, 2 systems). I went the route of keep the 2 systems completely separate EXCEPT for speakers. I would recommend that you simply pick up a reasonably priced amp for the music system and then run separate cables to the speakers and sub. The hassle is that you need to plug in the speakers to one or the other system when you wish to switch from HT to music. It is a bit of grief, but I do it in about 3 minutes and then everyone is happy and you can live with one room and one set of speakers. (You only need change the fronts and the sub). To keep things easier, if you use banana plugs on the HT set-up, you save even more hassle and you don't really sacrifice enough sound quality to worry about (but keep the spade connectors for the music...). The only extra expense is for the separate speaker cables but this also lets you minimize length for the music set-up and hide the HT gear (in my case, the music equipment is beneath my screen while the HT gear is hidden in a closet in the back of the room. The longer cables for the HT gear isn't a big deal and I minimize the length of the cable for the music system.

As I said, the only hassle is swapping speaker cables when I switch systems at the speaker end of things. Not really all that terrible and my wife continues to speak to me.