Home Theater Bypass

ambiophonics

I've been making a lot of changes in my living room 2-channel/home theater setup and am surprised that nobody seems to make a simple home theater bypass box. Basically a two or three input box with a volume control. I'm thinking about making something as it would really simplify my setup. If I used the 12 volt trigger signal from the home theater receiver I could make it automated - relays would automatically switch to the home theater input and bypass the volume pot when the trigger voltage was present.

footwedge

All eyes and ears here. Beyond my tech skills. "Build and they will come."

tonyb

Why would you need a volume control ? The whole idea of HT pass thru is to let the signal go untouched through your pre amp, you still use the volume control on the receiver. When using the pre amp and not the receiver, you use the volume control on the pre.

This feature is absent though on a lot of pre amps. They do make line switching boxes though but most don't use these as they add one more thing into the signal path, and the extra cables you'd have to buy.

Look for a pre amp that already has that feature built in.

ambiophonics

In my situation I don't really need a full fledged preamp. All I need is to be able to switch between two sources - preout from receiver and output from phono pre. I would want to add volume control to the phono input so I wouldn't need anything else between it and the poweramp. Isn't that basically what these preamps with HT bypass are doing anyway? One input is routed directly to the preout when the unit is powered off or in HT bypass, bypassing the volume control, tone controls etc?

tonyb

Have you tried running the output of the phono into the receiver using direct analog ? That would give you volume control and switching capabilities....which is basically what a pre amp is anyway. Granted a good pre will always sound better.

ambiophonics

I have tried running the phono preamp output into the receiver, and compared that to going directly into the TFM-35 from the phono pre (carver has a volume pot). It sounds cleaner and more detailed going directly to the amp, as it should.