Multi room system on the cheap

[Koofler]

I'm looking at setting up a cheapish multi room system at home using my iTunes media box as the hub and having speakers in two rooms running as one set.

iTunes will quite happily play to multiple AirPlay units so the plan is to use an Airport Express in each room - so far so good.

The bit I am struggling with at the moment is the lounge setup. I have speakers from my surround sound system that I want to reuse, 5 x satellites and a sub woofer. I plan to use 2 of the satellites plus the passive subwoofer and wanted to use a normal stereo amp (i.e. cheap). Would running the subwoofer in parallel on one channel work ok?

I haven't had much luck with a cheap amp with a powered subwoofer out although this http://www.maplin.co.uk/slimline-5.1-av-amplifier-... will switch to 2.1 so should work for £60.

Any other suggestions?

[Bullett]

What occurs is that trying to run 2 speakers from one output will cause a loading issue. Furthermore to drive a sub you really need a crossover otherwise the whole frequency range will pass via the sub.

That amp looks like it needs an active sub and you would need to check if it will up mix from stereo to 2.1 (by effectively running a crossover) to feed said sub. I might be wrong but a stereo feed to the amp may only output stereo not 2.1

[Koofler]

Cheers Bullett.

I did think that I may have over simplified things.

Looks like a trip to Maplins is on the cards tomorrow as I can't find a copy of the user guide online.

[NorthDave]

You should be OK running the subwoofer across both channels of the amplifier (i.e. Bridge the amplifier) as well as a pair of stereo pair of speakers. The subwoofer should have a crossover built in so should only try and play the low stuff anyway.

Just wire +ve to the left and -ve to the right - wont be an issue.

[Koofler]

Thanks Dave, I'll add this to my list of weekend experiments!