Zone 2: 4 speakers?

Hello:
Happy New Year to All! Hopefully a simple question. I have a 990/7700 set up. 5.1 utilized for home theater (all Definitive technology) and zone 2 involves 2 in wall Boston Acoustic speakers in Dining room. I am interested in putting 2 in ceiling speakers in my kitchen. I was wondering if I can jump the speaker wire for kitchen off the amp outputs for zone 2 speakers in dining room and just drive all 4 speakers as zone 2 or do I need a separate 2 channel amp? I understand that all 4 speakers would either be on or off but based on our floor plan, not a problem. In other words, can 2 channels on amp power 4 small in wall/in ceiling speakers? If so, how does one do this?

Thanks for the time.

James
housedoc

It can be done but you have to be careful that in wiring the speakers, you dont lower the effective resistance below the amps rating. The 7700 is pretty heavy duty for this purpose but if you burn out a channel it will cost some $$$. You should ask Outlaw about the best way to do it. You can purchase a speaker switcher which will allow you to swap from one pair to the other or play them together. I think a company named HomeTech makes a device which s pretty reasonable ($100).

http://www.hometech.com/hts/products/audio/selectors/

Housedoc, I concur with XenonMan. You want to make sure that the selecter does "impedence matching" so as to avoid the resistance problem noted by XenonMan. In fact I use a 6 zone speaker selector from Phoenix Gold. It is a simple switch that I use for 1 to 4 rooms simultaneously (kitchen, dinning room, living room, and office). It runs off of 2 channels from my Outlaw 7700 with 2 Jamo 60 watt speakers in each room. This has been hooked up and used for more than 3 years. The 7700 never even gets warm when I have my main system on (as noted in my signature) as well as all 4 rooms--even when I crank the volume when the wife is not home! Therefore, I don't think you will have any problem.

As a side note, I blew a speaker (a previous post about 15 months ago) before my 7700 even got warm!

Thank you for your interest and reply. This is great info. Sorry I did not respond sooner. I thought I would get an email if someone responded to my post but did not. I will check my settings. Thanks again for your advice.

Thank you for the great info and advice. I will post my results when it happens.

BTW, how do you use your 2 2200 in your system?

Housedoc, I have a 7.1 system and use my two 2200s to power my left and right mains--so they are center stage in my system (and if I had to do it again I would buy nine 2200s, one for each channel throughout my system so that I could easily replace an amplifier channel if one fails). In any event, my 7700 powers my center, 4 surrounds, and stereo zone 2. My two NHT U2 subwoofers are driven by two NHT A1 amplifiers (the NHT subwoofers and amplifiers were a matched system along with an X1 crossover), the internal compenents of which look like they were designed and manufactured by the same company--I am sure that Gonk or another outlaw can confirm.

I don't know who manufactured them, but the NHT A1 amps and the Model 2200 are based on the same design and built in the same factory. NHT rated them differently (250W at 6 ohms instead of 200W at 8 ohms) and had a different trigger wire connection (wire terminals instead of the 2200's 1/8" plug).