Assistance required on home setup--stumped!

[a1edition]

We recently bought a house that has in-wall speakers in our family room (the main room where our home theater is located) and the living room, at the other end of the house. There are two ceiling speakers in the family room and two wall speakers in the living room.

We had never tried to make use of them until just recently when we redid our family room and thought we'd like to have those in wall speakers up and running. We tested them by hooking them up to a receiver, and they all work rather well.

The desire to use those speakers is what brings me to this message board, as I'm stumped on how to make use of them with the equipment I have without buying a completely new sound system, which is not an option at this time.

Currently, we have a 55'' Vizio E550i-B2 hooked up to a Sony DAV-HDX589 surround sound system that goes through our Motorola DCT3416 cable box. We also have a Sony PS-LX300USB turntable hooked into the mix. With all this, every thing is great; however, the Sony surround sound receiver doesn't have the space to allow for additional speaker inputs. We have a Pioneer VSX-D557 receiver that is not being used (this is what we tested our in house speakers).

We can't figure out how to get the whole mishmash of equipment set up so that we can take advantage of those built in speakers. At minimum we'd like them available to pipe music through the house when we have guests over. The perfect scenario would be allowing for sound for Superbowl and Big-Ten games, GO BLUE!

Any thoughts? I have photos of every component, but being my first post, I wasn't sure if that would be helpful or annoying.

Thanks!

Surround sound system- Sony DAV-HDX589W
Television- Vizio E550i-B2
Turntable- Sony PS-LX300USB
Cable box- Motorola DCT3416
Currently unused receiver- Pioneer VSX-D557

 

[jinjuku]

I understand you want to take advantage but I am going to ask you HOW you want to take advantage.

What would a normal / typical usage scenario look like to you?

How long are the cable runs from where you would place your receiver to the two rooms that have in wall speakers?

 

[a1edition]

Jinjuku,

In the family room, where the system is set up, the cable run to the ceiling speakers is maybe 15-20 feet max. In the living room, wall speakers, the run is probably about 45-50 ft.

If I understand your question, typical/normal usage would be that they pipe music from whatever ends up being our main receiver, the lp player. Better yet, sound from football games when we have get togethers for those. Did I answer your questions properly. Noob here, sorry.

Thanks-

 

[ImcLoud]

that tv has audio outputs, so you could plug a little amp in there and hook that to the speakers... http://www.amazon.com/Lepai-LP-2020A-Tripath-Class-T-Amplifier/dp/B00C2P61FO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1408315770&sr=8-2&keywords=lepai+2020 you can do one for each zone or one with a splitter.. is there volume controls in each room?

 

[a1edition]

There is a separate volume control in the living room, yes. In the family room the speakers are set at the volume of the receiver and that's fine.

I do have an additional question that I should have mentioned. We were able to hook up the system, kind of, in the family room and got our surround sound and the ceiling speakers working fine. We could also hook up the system to use the surround sound and the living room speakers fine. But couldn't figure out how to do it all at the same time. Also, when we hooked up the ceiling speakers & surround sound system we got an echo in the sound as though one of the set of speakers is out of phase. I assume we have a digital/analog conflict and not sure how to avoid that.

If we were to get the amp you gave the link to, thank you, I assume we'd just use that for the living room only?

 

[a1edition]

Actually, it just dawned on me what you were saying. So whenever we have the tv volume up with our surround sound system, there is ALWAYS an echo. So we've never used the tv volume. Its always turned off. Only cables coming out of the tv are two HDMI; one goes to the cable box, the other to the Sony surround sound receiver.