Powered speakers and receiver on the same output

[Micah]

Hey Cocooners,

I want to feed the output from my htpc into my kitchen.

The problem I (think I) have is that the audio output from the htpc goes to a set of powered speakers.

I want to control the volume for the powered speakers from the htpc but I want to control the volume of the kitchen speakers from the receiver.

My concern is that when I increase the volume on the htpc the receiver will also increase volume because it's getting a higher input voltage.

Am I looking at this wrong or is there any way for me to do this?

One solution would be to get a second receiver and a set of speakers and subwoofer for the htpc and control each area seperatly with their respective receivers but I was hoping to avoid having to do that.

 

[bfisher]

I think I understand - you have powered speakers direct to the HTPC, and also your kitchen speakers (through a receiver) using your HTPC as an input...

If this is correct, your HTPC volume is going to be the master. If you change it, the kitchen speakers will change. If you turn HTPC all the way down, you won't get any sound from your kitchen speakers.

One way to avoid this is to get a second sound card - one for kitchen speakers and one for powered speakers. Another has already been identified by you which is a seperate receiver.

 

[Micah]

You got it fisher, that's exactly what I'm looking at.

2 soundcards, that I can do that.

Can I have the same output one both without running the output of one into the input of another?

 

[bfisher]

If you run output of one into the input of other - you will want to run the powered speakers into the other card (that is used as an input to your kitchen speakers). This way you can adjust the volume of the powered speakers without altering your kitchen speakers (and vice versa - you adjust volume of kitchen speakers using your amp volume, not the PC).

The other (better I think) way to do it is to run 2 cards independantly. Depending on your music software, they can use the same program (syncs both speakers) or different programs (multiple WinAmps, etc) (so you can listen to different things at the same time).

 

[Micah]

I've used multiple soundcards to output different audio on each but didn't realize you could sync them.

I'm using meedio so I'll have to play with that a bit and see if I can't get it to work.

Thanks for the info.