An ignorant question, but I gotta know

What will the relationship be between the 1050 and the 950? Can I use the 950 as a stand alone? When it says Pre-amp, what does it exactly do? Please excuse my stupidity.

The 1050 is basically a pre/pro with amplified channels. The 950 is just the pre/pro, no amplifiers. You need to supply the amplification for the number of channels you want to drive(up to 7)
There are a lot more differences between the two, which is why the 950/770(a 7 channel amplifier), will cost you over 5 times as much as the 1050. Hope that was clear!

Kent

[This message has been edited by kenty (edited January 22, 2002).]

I suppose you could use the 950 stand alone if all of your speakers were powered. Don't see too many of those setups, though.

True, if you were using something like Paradigm Reference's Active series, you wouldn't need amplification, but that's pretty darn rare.

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Gonk

So then, without amplification, what is the purpose behind the 950? What does it do?

the 950 is a pre/pro/tuner, basically it process sound. I.e. a signal comes from the dvd player, the 950 decodes that signal and process it to create your surround sound (or stereo sound).

the amplifier takes the processed signal and amplifies it, i.e. gives it power and sends it to the speaker.

If you wanted, you could get a good dvd player with lots of different decoding and an amplifier and skip the 950. There are some issues with that as well.

I am sure one of the others can better explain though.

Rich

This may serve to answer your question, and then beat the answer to a bloody pulp, but here it is anyway...

The 950 is a pre-amplifier/processor (and tuner, but they decided the label under the model number was getting too long and left "tuner" off). The idea behind a pre/pro is to separate the different tasks typically handled by a receiver -- move the bulky and power-intensive amplification to an amplifier and let the pre/pro handle only the signal switching and digital processing. There are a number of reasons behind it, typically sound quality (until recently, there weren't any receivers with amp sections that could hold a candle to a good amp or with "brains" that could match a good pre/pro -- there are a handful around now, but they can cost almost as much as a pre/pro and amp combined) and ease in upgrading (the amp should not care about the release of a new surround sound format or a new type of audio or video interface where the pre/pro would become "outdated").

So that's what pre/pros are. What does the 950 do? It controls what source you are listening to and/or watching (DVD, cable, digital cable, satellite, CD, tape deck, VCR, mini-disc, whatever). It also takes care of housekeeping tasks like decoding digital audio from DVD or other sources (digital cable, satellite, HDTV decoder) -- Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital EX, DTS, DTS ES, Dolby Pro Logic II if it is a two-channel format, etc. There is also work like bass management -- if your speakers can't reproduce sound below, say, 60Hz, the 950 would re-direct the info from those speakers that falls below 60Hz to the subwoofer. When it's through with all of that sort of work, it then delivers the selected video signal (if you chose to use it this way) to your TV, the LFE signal to the subwoofer (if necessary), and the separate analog audio signals to the amplifier(s) which then boost the signals and send them on to the speakers. In the case of the powered speakers Matthew Hill and I mentioned, each speaker would have it's own built-in amp, so the 95 would feed unamplified signals to each speaker directly, but as I said that's fairly unusual.

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Gonk

For all of you guys who keep this discussion interesting, I may be one of the people interested in having active loudspeakers: Are there any of them, besides the Active series from Paradigm (which, according to their web site, is discontinued now), that I could trust?

I read on a review (and it made sense to me) that it is actually very good to have active speakers, because the amp has already been matched to the speaker, which seems to be one of the tricky parts of setting up a nice sounding system.

Any help will be appreciated.

wharfedale has some amplified speakers on their website(wharfedale.com or whrfedaleusa.com)which are pretty cheap i think.I wouldnt go this route however,just because i own some wharfedale speakers and there are better speakers for your money,although i have nothing against wharfedale.matching the amp to the speakers definitely needs to be done but its actually quite simple-check your amps power rating-does it give a power rating into 4ohm and even as low as 2 ohm-if it gives a rating even into 2 ohm than it is very stable and you can use it with any speakers-basically just match the amps power rating to the speakers ohm rating-please note however that speakers ohm rating in use fluctuates so if you use 6ohm speakers with an amp rated into 6-8ohms only(not 4 or 2ohms)you can sometimes run out of power if you play your music loud.also the speakers sensitivity rating comes into play so if your using speakers with a lower db rating (86-87 db)youll need more power from your amp to make the speakers sound louder so you might want to get an amp with slightly more rated power than your speakers require in this case.if your speakers have a high sensitivity (89-90db)you can usually just match the ohm rating of amp and speaker,unless you really crank your music,in which case a little extra power in your amp may prevent the signal from clipping.

They do make sense, and I read some very similar stuff to what you've seen when I was shopping around last year. Unfortunately, I don't know of any speakers aside from Paradigm's Reference Active line.

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Gonk

Originally posted by nreyes:
For all of you guys who keep this discussion interesting, I may be one of the people interested in having active loudspeakers: Are there any of them, besides the Active series from Paradigm (which, according to their web site, is discontinued now), that I could trust?

You might want to check out some of Definitive Technology's active speakers. They have had some decent reviews. I personally haven't heard them, though.

[This message has been edited by alfack (edited January 23, 2002).]

How would you control volume with such a setup? What other issues would one likely encounter? Thanks - JJJ

I'm not sure if you could control the volume in that scenario, unless the DVD player included some control (which I know mine doesn't, even though it does have a Dolby Digital decoder).

If the variant of the ICBM that David Olstein proposed here existed, you could use it since he includes a volume control for each 5.1 input... Otherwise, I'm not sure what you'd have to do.

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Gonk