Dual purpose amp

As long as your amplifier has an input selection switch, you can have them both connected and also sending a signal, and switch between inputs.

Two caveats:

1. Depending on the amplifier's circuitry, you may get noise or signal bleed from the unselected input.
2. If the amplifier manufacturer didn't implement the input selection properly, then something very bad could happen. Generally speaking this shouldn't be an issue.

I don't understand why you'd want to connect an AVR to an amplifier. What are you trying to do?

@cleeds 

Some people don’t know the difference between an AVR and an AVP, some just use the terms invariably, like I use to 😀

Its definitely an AVR. Anthem MRX740. Im using the Anthem MCA325 3 channel amp for my LCRs. Which are Paradim 120H's and a 90C. I initialy bought the amp when I was using a Marantz cinema 60 because it didnt preform well at louder volumes. The amp fixed that. The loudness part anyway. Movies sounded pretty dam good, music not so much....So through advice from this forum i realized that I had to get the Marantz out of the 2 channel path for music. So began looking at separates. Well, that gets very expensive and my space is limited.  So I circled back around to AVRs. I realized tgat the cinema 60 was my weak link.  So fast forward and I landed on the Anthem MRX 740 because it rates very well for 2 channel, has a very good preamp section, and I was told a good DAC. And it does sound really good pairered with my Paradigms. I was told by the dealer when I bought the MRX that I could bypass the internal DAC by using the analog inputs.  Wrong.....after talking to Anthem, there is no way to bypass. I just want the ability to try out different stuff like streamers or DACs or CD players without running their signal through the Anthem DAC just to see if other components may give me a better 2 channel experience. So I figured why not use the balanced inputs on my amp??

I am new to this and have been having great fun learning. Thanks for any input. 

I don’t understand why you’d want to connect an AVR to an amplifier. What are you trying to do?

Some people don’t know the difference between an AVR and an AVP, some just use the terms invariably, like I use to 😀

@cleeds

He would connect an external amplifier to the preouts of an AVR (if/when it has them) to improve the sound quality of an AVR. Active internal power amp sections inside an AVR degrade the sound because the DAC, etc are in the same chassis, tied to the same power supply, etc.

An intermediate grade solution is....for example, Sound United has some AVR offerings that can disable all internal poweramp sections and run an AVR in pure multichannel preamp mode.

The high fidelity way of doing it is to get a dedicated high fidelity multichannel preamp processor designed/built from the ground up and pairing it with the same external power amps audiophiles like to rave about.

For those who don’t know such details, multichannel is for movies. For those who do, multichannel is for music.