anothor Newbie needing Amp advice

unc2701

wood4sheep2 wrote: »

To be clear the Engineer I talked to at Emotiva warned firmly against using this port as it is designed for IR. While the voltage is adequate and might functin in the short term in the long term He said it would damage the trigger in the Emotiva. The reason is that the design for IR will pulse the voltage in the way the IR pulses and that would be sent along as well as a voltage pulse to the trigger and would cause failure issues. He was very clear to use the method that I have as a the "safe" method.

Yeah, he probably didn't know what that port was- so you've got a few things going on back there- the IR ports, plus a power port to run an accessory. That power port is meant provide juice for an RF to IR bridge, but there's nothing special about that power port- it's just straight up 5v, no pulses or anything and by default it switches on and off with the power. Now the IR ports that have the 3.5mm jack like on the Emotiva WOULD be a problem, but I'm not talking about those... this is the socket that looks like what you see on gear that uses a wallwart.

It doesn't have a lot of current, so I would ask how much current the emotiva needs to trigger. Usually this is really low, but you don't want to overdraw the power supply for that port.

unc2701

...or if you don't trust me, just use this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MINTY-NILES-APC-3-Current-Sensing-AC-OUTLET-/220958751426?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item33722afac2

You plug the AVR into the current sensing outlet and the Emotiva into the switched outlet. When the pioneer comes on, it'll draw more current and tell the Niles to switch on the other outlet. If you prefer to have the Emotiva in standby rather than the "hard" AC on/off (what the Emotiva engineer was talking about), you can also wire the trigger outputs on the Niles to the trigger input on the Emotiva.

The only hiccup you might have is that the Pioneer is a "power vampire"- it draws current in standby, so you might get some accidental triggers depending on where you set the sensitivity on the Niles (the knob on the front).

Oh, and that other Niles thing you linked to is NOT what you want for this. That's an IR relay- while it might have some triggering feature that I don't know about, it's not the way to go.