Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater A Stupid Question.

I have a 3.1 setup. Since my living room doesn't work well with surrounds and I'm soon going to have an extra VP100 in/on-wall available. I was wondering.... Is there anyway I can combine the 2 side surrounds into a single rear to convert my 3.1 into a 4.1 system?

I believe if you only have a single rear channel speaker hooked up to my 3808 the Denon will run the system with surround and rear channels into that one speaker, so it should be possible depending on the receiver and its algorithms.

I just checked my manual and it states if no surround speakers are hooked up then you can not use the rear channels, yet I am sure I disconnected them and tried out this 4.1 sceanrio and it worked, could be I didn't set them to NO in the receiver and only disconnected them to check on how the rear center sounded on its own. So it seems that this 4.1 scenario will not work.

Indeed, the original Dolby Surround, and the first Prologic had a mono surround channel (even if you used two speakers). But I don't know how modern receivers handle only having one surround hooked up.

My Pioneer doesn't seem to have the option for that, only 6.1 a single rear with two surrounds.

Checking the manual for the Pioneer VSX-21TXH, you can have a 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 setup only. I have 3.1, but this is allowable and the side surrounds get mixed into the L and R.

I can connect a single rear speaker as a 6.1. It gets connected to the Left channel Rear surround jack. You have to have left/right side surrounds for this to work though.

What I was wanting to do is to see if there is any way I could put the 2 positive terminals and the 2 negative terminals together (left and right surround) coming out of the receiver and attach them to 1 speaker. I was thinking that there might be some sort of black box available that would allow me to do this.