Amps and Speakers Watts

[DaveMurphy]

I'm trying to order 8 speakers for one of our bigger rooms, i've looked on the net and a pair is 75W which is in total 300W do i need a 300W amp? can i go to a 320W amp? how's it work?



Cheers

[j17sparky]

Make sure the "watts" are always in RMS when matching them up.

Each speaker must have its own channel ie you cant have 4 speakers running from a 2 ch amp (well you can but i wont go into it here).

How big is big? The longer the run, the better quality cable you will need, and even then you might need abit of head room for the longer runs or you might end up with speakers noticably louder than others...

If you are going for 8 speakers then have a look at multi zone amps. They will allow you to control the volume of each (pair of) speakers, helping with the above problem.

Why 8 speakers? More isnt always better. Obviously depending on usage; i would normally go with a decent pair of stereo speakers over 4 pairs of not so good ones.


Oh and probably the most important point of all; not all speakers are built equal, a pair of 75watts rms arnt always going to be louder than a 50watt rms pair, or even a 40 watt

[mac_shinobi]

prolly a daft statement / question but isn't 8 speakers classified as a 7.1 setup

7 speakers and the .1 being the sub woofer so 8 in total ( not sure if the sub is classed as an extra speaker or not )

[powdarrmonkey]

prolly a daft statement / question but isn't 8 speakers classified as a 7.1 setup

7 speakers and the .1 being the sub woofer so 8 in total ( not sure if the sub is classed as an extra speaker or not )

Only in setups designed like that - in pure stereo, you just get the same sound coming from each pair.

[DaveMurphy]

at the moment theres... umm... theres 11 speakers going through a 120w amp. which isnt giving 'descent' sound, the speakers are old so plan to replace them. the building is really old and the length is about 60 meters.

[laserblazer]

60m. Is that the cable length?

[localzuk]

Ok, you should be looking at the resistance of the speakers and the channels on the amp. So, for example, if your amp does 4 Ohms per channel, and you have 8 amp speakers, you can run 2 on a single channel in parallel.

8/2 = 4 Ohms

There's a lot of good advice in this thread: multiple speakers will i blow amplifier - AVForums.com