Receiver for a pre-amp question...

jcaut

This is probably a dumb question, so I apologize ahead of time:

Is it harmful in any way to use a HT receiver with a set of speakers disconnected? I'm virtually certain that it is not...
I know there are others doing it.

I've got a Denon 3801, and I want to feed the front pre-outs to a seperate amp, but leave the other speakers connected for HT use. That's the reason the 'pre-outs' are there, right? I never really thought about it before, but there's no way to "turn off" the speaker outs. It would be my thinking that turning them "off" just amounts to disconnecting them anyhow.

I'm just remembering a long time ago someone told me that it was bad to run an amp without any speakers connected. I hope they were full of it..

Thanks!
Jason

juice21

jcaut, you can run your two front pre-outs to a seperate amp to power your fronts, and keep the rest of your speakers connected to the reciever and it will work fine. won't do any damage to the reciever doing this, alot of people upgrade and use their reciever only as a pre-pro...

TroyD

I am using the preouts for L,R and Center....so far no problems!

Think of it this way, a lot of folks buy the receiver and then add the speakers later....no worries

Troy

rskarvan

Receivers make piss-poor pre/pro's.
I also have the 3801 powering an external amp.
Well, thats not actually true... I have the 3801 providing
a signal to a preamp with a HT unity-gain pass thru.
Then, I route it via balanced cables to a power amp.
The reason for the preamp is to lower the noise level.
Also, for stereo listening, I can just leave the 3801 OFF.

I simply don't trust a receiver to do a good job of providing
a good clean signal to an external amp for any sort of critical listening.

My 2 cents.

TroyD

I agree with Ron, it isn't the ideal situation.

If you are like me though, until you get the a preamp, no, you won't harm anything using it that way...

Troy

jcaut

I'm shopping for a pre-amp, but I'll most likely be using the 3801 with the amp for a while (Christmas cash is gone ). Anybody want to suggest a good quality, inexpensive stereo preamp with lots of inputs?

Not knocking the Denon at all, but ... Powering the RT800i's with the TFM-35 makes a HUGE difference in the sound. Everyone told me it would, but I was surprised anyway. I do notice a tiny bit more "hiss" with no signal, but no hum that I can hear. I'm truly impressed.

rskarvan

Before I got my pre-amp, I was using Monster 300 series interconnect cables to connect my 3801 to my external amp.

I wasn't happy (at all) with the level of hiss in the system.

I switched to Monster M550 pro-grade interconnects from the receiver. The hiss was greatly diminished.

I moved my lower-grade Monster 300 to supply the signal from my amp to my PSW650 (along with another cable providing the LFE input to the sub).
The advantage was that I could use the sub and added the capability to adjust the frequency of the sub with the sub controls. Also, I could leave the 3801 OFF when listening in stereo.

I don't know if you purchased your amp yet...but, I believe that XLR interconects between the amp and the preamp are a must. They have been tested to lower the background noise (hiss) by 6db's - very significant.

Someday, I'll buy a 5 channel amp and a seperate processer and move the 3801 to 2nd tv duty (not the bigscreen). That upgrade is probably a long way off though; and, truthfully, for movies it is probably not necessary at all. For DVD-A it would probably be very nice though.

Recommendations for preamps:
1. Stay away from adcom - they aren't reliable (I'm told).
2. I have the Krell KAV-250P. Its fabulous.
A good preamp should do this and this only.
It should provide a 100% resistive network to handle signal attenuation (no capacitors in the circuit path for this). Also, it should have very fast transistors to handle signal amplification. If you can, buy a fully-balanced configuration pre-amp. The amount of ciruitry necessary to support a fully balanced design truly doubles. This is why balanced pre-amps are more expensive (but, definitely worth it).

The quality of a preamp is probably the most important component in your stack. At the low signal levels, any noise introduced just gets amplified and past onto your speakers. If you can keep the noise level down, the entire presentation of the music improves. Louds seem louder because softs seem softer. Its all relative. Also, do you really want to be passing useless high frequency noise to your tweeters. I sure don't.