Who R U?

My turn. I'm a 44 y/o man who could stand to lose a few pounds. Boy do I fit into a group. I am an orthpedic surgeon specializing in spinal surgery. I have invented a couple of implants which has helped fuel a newfound passion for music and an old one for fast cars. I have spent the past year putting together a new sytem. I originally started with home theater, but have now graduated to a separate but combined system. I have used this site extensively to learn and to buy everything from amps to speakers. My wife puts up with my obsessions very good-naturedly, but my 5 children (aged 3-11) take up a LOT of my time.We are at a lucky time, where the music is good, the equipment is stupendous (compared to my college system of a Sansui amp with a Rega turntable and Advent speakers)and the sources are finally catching up. David

David, maybe you could shed some light on what it takes to put together a good "combined but separate" HT & 2 Channel system. Maybe start another thread. I've wanted to do this, cause the cost of having two good systems plus decent video is getting to be a lot to carry. Thanks, Michael

hi swampwalker, there are more & more preamps that offer dedicated h-t proccessor outputs - when ewe select this output, your main preamp defaults all its controls to the processor, so ewe can use the processor's volume control, etc, to run *all* the speakers. the rest of the time, the two main audio speakers don't see any of the processor electronics - ewe have the two main speakers driven by the preamp, & the surround speakers connected to the processor. preamps i knoew about that do this are made by linn, sonic-frontiers, vtl. i'm sure there are others. doug

Doug is completely correct. I bought a Rowland Coherence preamp that has a bypass input that defaults volume control to the theater processor. another way to ay that is that it has unity gain. funvtionally, when I listen to music the HT is completely out of the loop.When tha HT is going, i must choose the bypass circuit and the HT processor treats the main spaeakers as it's own front channels.David

I just figured out something cool. The adcom gfp-750 has a processor input. This is just a switched RCA-RCA passthru. I run the variable outputs of my XA7 CD player into it. This gives me the ability to use the XA7's CD remote for volume and track selection. Very nice.