Niles SI-1230 Installation & Operation Manual page 9

Using Mono For Smoother Coverage
In a large or irregularly shaped room you will often discover that in a particular
chair, all you can hear is one speaker. If the room's speakers are connected to a
stereo amplifier you hear only half the music. The solution would be to connect
that room's speakers to a monophonic amplifier. However, if you make one room
mono with conventional systems, all of the other rooms in the system are mono
as well. For the first time, the SI-1230's BusMatrix enables you to route mono to
one speaker without affecting the quality of the stereo in the rest of the system.
You can configure each room to stereo or mono with no ill effects. Some of the
most popular areas where mono will greatly enhance the quality of the sound
would be:
1. Large rooms with many seating areas and/or many pairs of speakers
2. Irregularly shaped rooms
3. Bathrooms with one speaker over the tub and one speaker over the sink(s)
4. Hallways or passageways (even those with multiple speakers)
5. Small rooms where only one speaker will physically fit
Adding More than Two Surround Sound Speakers
In a home theater, we try to reproduce the experience of a great movie theater in
our homes. The biggest difference between a commercial theater and your home
is the rear or surround speaker array. In a home with a single pair of speakers
it is easy for the surround effects to sound like they are "in the middle of your
head", just like headphones!
The best way to create a strong "surround" effect is to use multiple speakers. In
large or unusually shaped rooms this might be the only way to achieve good
sound. However, the built-in surround amplifier channels of a typical receiver will
not successfully power more than one
pair of speakers. If your surround proces-
sor or receiver has rear pre-outputs you
can easily improve the surround effect
with additional speakers and one or two
channels of an SI-1230. The individual
level controls of the SI-1230 allow six
decibels of gain over the main and center
amplifiers for easy calibration of a mix of
brands/models of speakers.
Additional surround speakers fed by the
SI-1230 greatly enhance the effectiveness of
your surround sound system.
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