Help Appreciated - surround plus stereo out

mungler

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Hi,

After a bit of advice... we just moved to our new house and I think the previous owner was a bit of an audiophile. Here's the deal:

Living room has loads of speakers:

  • centre speaker under TV
  • high left and right speakers in ceiling
  • three rear speakers (left, right, centre)
  • connection for subwoofer

To this, I've added my AppleTV 4K, 55in Samsung TV and a pair of Wharfedale diamond speakers and a Wharfedale subwoofer.

I find the centre rear a bit confusing, as that's effectively 8 channels plus sub. I guess he maybe hooked it to centre as well?

The rest of the house has an ageing Linn system, with a Linn Intersekt box in the living room.

Overall I'd say music is more important to us than movies.

What we're after:

1) a way to get decent surround sound for movies, and good sound for music in either stereo or dolby atmos (via Apple Music). I'm not looking to create a full Atmos speaker setup, or change any speakers just now, but would like both Atmos and non-atmos music sources to sound their best with the speakers which are present. For reference our current stereo amp is a Cambridge Audio CXA61, so comparable(ish) sound for music would be good.

2) a way to play music in the living room and have the option to distribute the same audio, in sync, via the Linn system.

I've been doing research and I feel like a multi zone AV receiver might be what's needed. The Linn box only appears to have RCA analogue inputs so no HDMI or Toslink is possible there.

Ideally I'd prefer to use as many speakers as possible, so if the zone thing takes up some channels then maybe a 9.x multi zone AV receiver is the way to go?

At my disposal I have:

Cambridge Audio CXA61
Sony STR-DH520 (cheap eBay job I got to try 7.1)
AppleTV 4K
Linn Intersekt

Happy to sell the Cambridge if a suitable AV receiver will do a decent enough job for music.

Don't want to spend much money, definitely not more than a grand, ideally £400-600 (skint after buying the house!)

Any and all help and advice appreciated. Really not very familiar with home cinema stuff at all.

Thank you!
 
To add a few things:

If we're watching a surround sound film or listening to Atmos mix music, it'd be great to still hear it in the other rooms via Linn. Obviously this won't be surround, but if it's downmixed to stereo this would be fine, I think?

Also apologies if I've posted this in the wrong forum, mods please feel free to move it.
 
Add an AVR to the Lounge plus 2 x SONOS PORT (or second hand CONNECT) - one for the AVR plus one for the LINN multi-room system, that way you can listen to the same or different sources in the two 'zones'.

Longer term you could add additional SONOS Zone players to the multi-room system.

Joe
 

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