Experts Needed! Installing a 5.1 Surround Sound system in outdoor pavilion. Thanks

521 is not much of a receiver for 20 x 40 area.

A single 10,000uF cap and a total chasis weight of about 19 pounds...at most that receiver would give you about 30 watts/channel at 8 ohms.

Keep the volume down for sure...

If they are gonna turn it up here's my suggestion:

http://www.artofsale.net/mstore/index.php/yamaha-rx-v667-7-2-channel-home-theater-receiver-rxv667.html

http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-A500-Reference-Amplifier/dp/B000CZ0RL0/ref=sr_1_5?s=musical-instruments&ie=UTF8&qid=1335563843&sr=1-5

Grab that receiver to power the rears and then the Behringer A500 power amplifier for the fronts (where the most output will be).

Give you a solid 115W/ea for the front channels and the receiver can give you close to 100W/channel for the center and rears.
Edited by astrallite - 4/27/12 at 3:06pm

I do not understand how you will protect against humidity. I think speakers will not last long. How about some specialty outdoor speakers? http://www.outdoorspeakerdepot.com/patiospeakers.html

I think you've got the wrong approach here... You have a large open space, minimal room loading characteristics, and you are throwing inefficient "home and car" oriented speakers with relatively weak amplification and no dispersion control at the problem. The same recipe would probably work just fine in a typical small theatre room or living room, but in a large space, with practically no room loading, and more spatial noise and atmospheric conditions to combat, you need raw clean SPL from efficiency and clean power both.

If you have the ability, I suggest building your own "in-wall" baffle plates. You don't even have to build a box, just cut a piece of wood, put holes in it, and install drivers and a crossover network. My suggestion is to use sound reinforcement drivers, probably 8-10" midbass units for the front mains, (or 2x6.5" in MTM for center, TMM for mains), crossed to some 1" compression drivers on 90 degree horizontal horns, single 6.5" on the rear channels would be fine. I can help select drivers and design a crossover specific to them if you are interested in this route. Driver cost would be ~$100-150 per front channel, probably under $100 for each rear channel. Figure on $10-20 in x-over components per channel to be on the safe side. Expect up to ~$700 total cost here for the 5 speakers. I like the idea of TMM front mains, and MTM center... The reason being, I assume your "mains" will be installed on some pillars of sorts. Depending on the width of those pillars, you may be facing some significant baffle step losses since these "pillars" would be essentially in "free space." A dual mid-bass design makes for a reasonably easy to way to implement baffle step correction via a 0.5 way based x-over. (in this case, a 2.5 way).

With the efficiency of the pro-sound speakers, you will be able to get by without a complicated amplification setup IMO. A decent receiver should do the trick. ~$300-500 range new, or IMO, your best bet is to scour craigslist in your area and try to find a unit recent enough to cover your signal processing/switching needs. You may be able to find an older, but better made, more powerful receiver this way.

The remaining ~$500 (or more if possible) of the budget should go towards the sub and amplifier. I'd suggest looking for used but working pro-sound bridgeable amplifiers on craigslist or on various pro-sound forum classifieds, or ebay, or something like that. Around $100-200 should get you a solid 1000W of amplification in the used market. Don't buy a pyle or pyramid or studio pro BS amp. Do some research or get opinions from folks here or on pro-sound forums before buying. Crown and QSC are well respected brands. You can buy a brand new ~1000W Crown XLS series that would make a great sub amp for about $300 if you can stretch the budget a bit.

The sub, should be positioned on the ground, putting subs up in the air reduces their space loading effect, resulting in greater losses at the listening position. For an outdoor application, you are already competing with enormous losses, don't make things harder on yourself by putting inefficient small-box car subs up in the air. Normally I would suggest custom building a sort of horn loaded sub... I'm not sure if that's in the cards here, let me know. At minimum, a large bass reflex enclosure should be implemented. A single 18" sub should be the absolute minimum considered for an open space like this. Since this is for an outdoor "theatre," a typical PA bass bin will probably not have the proper pass band you want for this application. Modifications to an existing box, or a custom box are almost mandatory here IMO.

Regards,
Eric
Edited by mdocod - 4/28/12 at 12:44am

I think that's going to sound like cheap beer porch party trash. Those speakers you have ordered aren't even in the ballpark of correct for the application. Unless the link is wrong? The ICE800TTWRS?

Adding "rock subs" will just add to the disaster. A tiny plastic box with an 8" woofer in it would make lots of funny noises during a movie, not very many of them would be appreciable IMO.

Is the goal for this to sound like a theatre or not?

Seriously, free space will literally eat bass for lunch. It takes a ton of displacement and box gain to get anywhere with bass response in free space.

You asked for "expert" advise, so am being ultra critical here. I assume you wanted expert advise to get expert results

Regards,
Eric

Beats the newbie OPs on this forum asking for awesome home theater systems for $150.