My brother-in-law recently gave my mother his old Panasonic SC-HT650, it's one of those home theaters in a box setups. Anyways, I knew a few years back that it was working great, but after I hooked it up for my mother I could easily tell some speakers were blown. After looking to see what the unit's specs were I found that the amp is rated at 30W for the front channels, 38 for the surround, 80 for the center, and 144 for the subwoofer. These ratings are the FTC power output at 1.0% total Harmonic Distortion. This unit is also designed to be used with 6 ohm speakers.
I did a little browsing myself and it seems most of the speakers I found were either 8 ohm or 3 ohm. If I went with 8 ohm speakers then the only issue I see is that the amp won't put out it's rated power, but if I went with 3 ohm speakers I'd likely ruin the amp. Can anyone give me a little advice on what to do? Sadly, we can't afford to go out and just buy a new surround sound, so figured it'd be cheaper to replace the speakers on this unit. However, I noticed that with the price of many of the speakers I looked at it could very well be cheaper to just buy a new home theater system. Are there not any fairly reasonably priced replacement speakers for these things?
Seems odd to me that a HTIB set-up would end up blowing the speakers it comes with. If it were me i'd be wary of hooking up new speakers to it. They may meet the same fate if there's a problem with the amp. If you have an 8 ohm speaker lying around, try connecting it just to make sure the amp is actually working properly. A pair of old car stereo speakers wired in series would work too.
I agree with the other two replies on here as well. Basically, you need to stay with 8-ohm speakers if you are doing a speaker replacement only and trying to utilize the amp inthe system. Most HTIB systems have 8-ohm speakers, so you should be safe with the impedance. My feelings are that the problem may liein the amp itself and like the other poster mentioned, you may run into the same old problem and blow your replacement speakers as well. By the time you replace the speakers twice, you will probably be back up to the price point of an entry-level new HTIB system.
As for teh sub, matching it up with 8-ohm speakers is not a problem. If the original speakers are rated at 6 ohms, then the 8-ohm speaker will simply pull less power fromthe amp. You would not want to go with 4-ohm speakers, however as that impedance is too low and could damage the amp.
Hope this helps.
I'm thinking the same thing J Ro is.
You might be better off just buying a whole new HTIB for your mother. There are some really nice kits out there that would cost about the same as buying 5 brand new speakers and a sub.
Here's a great example HTIB from Onkyo
Current Gear: Sammy DLP Sony DVD [pre-HDMI] Sony STR-DE 995 Sony speakers
Yeah, I thought it was a bit odd that the speakers sounded blown myself, but I do know that my Brother-in-law had/has a tendency to really crank the volume on everything. As for car speakers, the only one's I've got are 4 Ohm and the speakers for my surround sound are 4 Ohm as well, so no dice. I looked into that Onkyo and truth be told, that's much more than we are willing/able to spend. If we went with a new surround sound it would likely be a $200 something one from Wal-Mart. This was why I said it looked as though buying some new speakers could cost more than a new system. I did do some searching on Ebay for some cheap replacement speakers and it looks as though I could end up spending as little as $50 for some CHEAP replacement speakers. I found some Polk speakers that looked fairly promising for just a little more, but they were rated at 8 Ohm. The subwoofer didn't sound damaged, but even if it weren't, I have a feeling that it wouldn't be wise to use it along with 8 Ohm speakers. Would it be ok to just unplug it and not use it, or will unhooking it cause some ill effects to the amp?