Hello all,

I am a current 990 & 755 owner and am very pleased. I am currently considering how to upgrade my system and I am looking at the 997 closely.

My situation: I have a home theater in my livingroom (primary) but put a set of older 5 channel speakers outside on my patio for parties etc. Both sets of speaker wires terminate by my home theater equipment rack. I'm trying to find a good solution to power both sets of speakers (unlikely it would ever be simutaneously - but possible).

I was thinking a receiver with pre-outs.

But, now maybe with the 997 I could use the balanced outs to my 755 amp and the regular pre-outs to a separate amplifier.

What do you think?

Marcus

The 990's balanced and unbalanced pre-outs are both active, if I remember correctly, so this is a possible solution assuming that the 997 behaves similarly. You would need to power amps on/off manually to control which zone was active, and if you wanted to use both at once you'd have to live with the same source, processing mode, and volume setting for both. Also, the 755 only has unbalanced RCA connections, so you'd need to add an amp with XLR's (or use some XLR-to-RCA adapters) in order to make this work - which may not be a problem since you need a second amp in this scenario anyway...

This might be a nice time to consider upgrading your power amplifier. A 7500 is a step up from the 755 and will work with either balanced or unbalanced (RCA/XLR) inputs.

Mine's actually running the mains unbalanced and the center and two surrounds balanced.

Why not run the mains and center balanced with the surronds unbalanced? It's still using 3 XLR and 2 RCA cables.

I'm using the KUBE equalizer for the 107's and it does not support XLR (balanced) input/output. If not for that restriction I would run all channels balanced.

Thanks everyone. Sounds like this is the solution for me.

Marcus