Newbie needs help with surround sound!

Guys,
I’m new to the forum. I’m using a Denon 1712 receiver to distribute audio around my shop. It’s about 3,000sf so I need all 7 channels plus the sub to get sound everywhere. I’m listening mostly to music that I stream from my ipod connected to my computer, and occasionally I watch the game on Sunday. I’m reading the receiver user manual and there are like 10,000 options for how the unit can process the input signal I send it. Problem is I can’t get the rear channels to work. I don’t care about speaker balance or weighting as this isn’t a typical home theater set up. Is there an option that will allow me to get an equal output from all of the speakers? I’m basically using this as a cheap distributed audio setup since I owned all this equipment anyway and wasn’t using it. Thanks for any help.
Mike

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Originally Posted by carfan1

Guys,
I’m new to the forum. I’m using a Denon 1712 receiver to distribute audio around my shop. It’s about 3,000sf so I need all 7 channels plus the sub to get sound everywhere. I’m listening mostly to music that I stream from my ipod connected to my computer, and occasionally I watch the game on Sunday. I’m reading the receiver user manual and there are like 10,000 options for how the unit can process the input signal I send it. Problem is I can’t get the rear channels to work. I don’t care about speaker balance or weighting as this isn’t a typical home theater set up. Is there an option that will allow me to get an equal output from all of the speakers? I’m basically using this as a cheap distributed audio setup since I owned all this equipment anyway and wasn’t using it. Thanks for any help.
Mike

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Does this mean when you ran the calibration microphone feature, you got no sound from the rear speakers?

I never ran the calibration microphone, since I'm not using the system in a conventional way I figured it wasn't going to help. I just want to automatically turn on all the speakers and make them all equal in the output of sound.

Mike

Set the output to "multi ch stereo" which stands for multi-channel stereo. You'll get essentially the same output from every speaker instead of Dolby Surround. For your application, this will be the best way to get sound throughout your shop.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Top Speed for the reply. I tried that already but no good. I've noticed that there is a setting in the manual for setting the system to work with rear speakers, I guess so those who just want to use it as a 5.1 setting can turn off the rear outputs, and I'm wondering if I need to confirm that it's set for 7.1. I'll check that and see if it helps.

Mike

P.S. As an AMC guy (two 69 AMX's) I love seeing the quote from Mark Donohue!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by carfan1

Thanks Top Speed for the reply. I tried that already but no good. I've noticed that there is a setting in the manual for setting the system to work with rear speakers, I guess so those who just want to use it as a 5.1 setting can turn off the rear outputs, and I'm wondering if I need to confirm that it's set for 7.1. I'll check that and see if it helps.

Mike

P.S. As an AMC guy (two 69 AMX's) I love seeing the quote from Mark Donohue!

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I use my 7.1 Yamaha receiver in 5.1 and have the outputs off for those speakers. Hope that works.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by carfan1

Thanks Top Speed for the reply. I tried that already but no good. I've noticed that there is a setting in the manual for setting the system to work with rear speakers, I guess so those who just want to use it as a 5.1 setting can turn off the rear outputs, and I'm wondering if I need to confirm that it's set for 7.1. I'll check that and see if it helps.

Mike

P.S. As an AMC guy (two 69 AMX's) I love seeing the quote from Mark Donohue!

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Hey Mike,
Always nice to meet another car guy and those AMX's are starting to find traction with collectors.

Sometimes, you have to assign the rear speakers. I don't know if you've got your AVR connected to a monitor, but you may check the on screen display (osd) and make sure the rears are even turned on. Sometimes, they have been assigned as Zone 2, which would account for no sound.

Thanks topspeed. I believe you may be correct about the rears being assigned to zone 2. I'm going to try to go into system setup and set them up as surround back speakers and see what that does. Thanks.

Once you get all your channels working you should run the auto set up to be sure all channels are equal in output, plus it will EQ your sub nicely.