dgarretson's suggestion is the way to go. I route my cambridge audio receiver fl/fr output to my sonic frontiers preamp and amp. Speakers are AAD 2001 monitors for fl/fr, with (obviously mismatched) Def Tech center, rear and subwoofer. Listening to "white noise" I hear the disparity in tone between fl/fr and center speakers, but when viewing a movie I really don't. BTW, some people wonder whether it hurts their 5 channel receiver (or amp) if they utilize just 3 channels. It doesn't. Cheers, Ben