I am now ready to connect the two 2200's I just received. I intend to use them to power two mini-stratas in a two channel mode. Currently there are a left, right, center and two rear surround speakers connected to the the 7500 which in turn is connected to the 990 via balanced cables. The question is should I connect the 2200 to the left and right channel of the 990 and then utillize the left/right surround channels for the existing speakers? I have read Gonks article on the 200 and researched how to use trigger 1 & 2, I am just not sure where the balanced cable should go from the 2200 to the 990.

Since you plan to use the 2200's to drive your Mini's, you would want to move the left and right channel cables from the 7500 to the 2200's (both for the balanced cables from the 990 and for the speaker cables). The 7500 can remain unchanged otherwise, or if you have a 7.1 setup you could move the other set of surrounds onto the left/right channels of the 7500.

As for the triggers, I can think of two reasonable approaches. You could let the 2200's auto-detect a signal, in which case you wouldn't need trigger cables. You could also daisy-chain trigger 2 from the 990 to one amp and then to the other amp, in which case you would need to set the "Trigger 2" control to "On" for each of the 990's inputs so the amps come on.

Gonk,thank you for your quick response.So that I am clear, you reccomend that I attach the speaker cable from the respective mini to the corresponding 2200. I would then attach the balance cable from each 2200 to the respective left and right channel of the 990. The current left and right surround speaker wire remains with the 7500 but where does the current left and right balanced cable supporting those channels hook up to the 990 since the 2200 cable now occupys that space? I hope this makes sense.

Ah... I see... You are running the Mini's separately from your main system. Missed that in your earlier post, and I thought you were just replacing the fronts.

New plan: if you use the balanced cables to connect to the 2200's, use unbalanced cables to connect the 990 to the 7500 and switch those two channels of the 7500 to the unbalanced input. You'll need to recalibrate the system because the fronts will probably see a drop in signal strength of about 3dB when they change to unbalanced.

Thank you. I'll come back and report on the task and the resulting sound.

If the multi-channel system is utilizing the balanced cabels, why not just use unbalanced for the 2200/minis ? That way everything else stays the same.
I'm assuming your using the jumper on the minis to drive the woofers, otherwise, you'll need to split the signal with a y adapter at the 990 runing one of the cabels to the 2200s (and then speaker cabel from the 2200s to the high frequency section of the minis ) and the second directly to the low frequency section of the minis. Since the mini low frequency section doesn't hav a balanced input, i think this would probably be the preferred set-up.

Koyaan, would the sound quality be the as good utilizing the unbalanced for the minis? After all that is the sole purpose of this exercise.

The only difference I've found with balanced cabels is a couple db more volume. Balanced cables are only superior if your making a very long cable run.
Also, if you ever want to drive the low frequency section of the minis directly from the
990, you'll have to use unbalanced as the minis dont have a balanced input. this setup would require some tweaking of volumes anyway, but being somewhat anal, I've always tried to be consistant and introduce as few variables as possible.