home audio and outdoor deck audio: new setup needed

[zack small]

so, a few years ago parts of my home flooded, an absolute catastrophe, I had a perfect system... one that included my four fisher speakers embedded in the ceiling, and my two outdoor deck speakers. what was damaged? my receiver(s), to tell you the truth i have no idea what was in my cabinet a friend had set it up for me and told me to push whatever buttons and thats what i did. so with those fried i went out and bought a home audio system from sony that came with speakers and blu ray and internet and everything else, except i did not connect the factory speakers fro sony just their subwoofer, so sony has these unique clips they use for their speakers and i cut the cords of their wires and connected them to my fisher speakers in the ceiling so now i thought i was golden with my new subwoofer. except the surround sound was not working so i thought oh man . now that i'm having my deck replaced i thought it would be a good time to get my old system up and running again including the two outdoor speakers i mentioned previously. so what i have now is my sony blu ray thingy, 2 working fisher speakers, and a sony subwoofer. (the two connected to the surround outlets on the back of the blu ray work, they just don't work with the blu ray). so what i need is all four of my speakers to work again, plus if i could keep the subwoofer that would be cool, and i want my two outdoor speakers to work again but on separate sources or whatever. i want to be able to play music inside without it playing outside at times, and i also want the opposite and i would also like the flexibility to play in both places at the same time. i'll mostly be using a device called gramofon, for spotify connect, i tried sonos and it didn't really work for me, i had a play bar and two play 1's in my basement for my tv(like they recommend but i started thinking if i had to wire the whole house with sonos it would cost a pretty penny haha. i would have no problem getting more than one receiver if thats my best bet. so if all this works out i'm hoping that the receiver(s) always stay on and i can pull out my laptop open spotify play a song and select living room, then as i'm going out on the deck select deck and the music would play out on the deck so please give me some options on what i should get

 

[WaynePflughaupt]

Hard to say since you didn’t give us a link or model # for your Sony, but it sounds like you picked up a so-called “home theater in a box” (HTIB).

There are lots of problems with HTIB’s. For starters, since they’re cheap they don’t last long. Those proprietary speaker connections are another. Often HTIB’s come with speakers that have unusual nominal impedances, and since the amplifier is specifically designed to handle them, they don’t often don’t like other speakers with different impedances. Basically HTIB’s are stand-alone systems and don’t “play nice” with other equipment, either outboard hardware or speakers.

If you want to stick with the HTIB, I imagine your lack of surround (back speakers working) is merely a setting in the HTIB that you didn’t do correctly. Again, no way to advise further without a link to a manual that we can look at.

However, your desires for operating the outdoor speakers are beyond the capabilities of most HTIBs. If you’re serious about that you’re going to have to scratch the HTIB and start from scratch with a traditional AV receiver that has capabilities for a second zone (most do, even cheaper ones). You won’t be able to keep the Sony sub either, as it most likely is passive and as such works only with the Sony system. Another example of the general inflexibility of HTIBs.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[zack small]

alright, bummer... i'm definitely willing to start from scratch. the sony was basically a home theater in a box haha, it was basically an impulse buy because i saw blu-ray and it was on sale for like 350 bucks. i'm typically so stubborn with these things and i always search for a deal. but now i'm here to listen.

I've further researched and i found that my fisher speakers have a rating of 60 watts and, on the back of the sony it says 170 watts. so maybe in theory that means its only going to operate two speakers and a sub because that's all it can do power wise? I'm just throwing ideas out with no true idea as to what i'm talking about haha. so anyways if i'm starting from scratch i believe i found a product that would be perfect. One with a & b function, it has inputs for 5.1 surround plus an input for two extra "front" speakers. so that sounds awesome to me if that would be how it would work

(Also, i looked at the back of the speakers that came with the sony and it said 3Ω, and from what i researched the fisher speakers are rated at 8Ω)