Will my Onkyo Home Theater In A Box work with a new receiver?

August 28, 2019 7:37 AM

Long story short, I bought an Onkyo HT-28409home theater in a box some years back. It's sat in my basement boxed up until next month when we move into our first house. Included is the Onkyo TX-NR609 receiver. By looking at the websites and specs I would presume that the receiver isn't proprietary in my case, there's the normal speaker wire screw on inputs from what I can see. I'd like to upgrade to a newer Denon 4k receiver as part of a staged upgrade. More details inside!

I looked up some of the specs for the HTIAB:

**Audio**
Input Impedance 47 KOhm
Input Sensitivity 200 mV
Output Power (Total) 770 Watt

**Amp Output**
Output Power / Channel 100 Watt
Output Impedance / Channel 8 Ohm

**Speaker Details**
Nominal (RMS) Output Power 120 Watt
Frequency Response 25 Hz, 55 Hz, 80 Hz
Input Impedance 6 Ohm
Sub looks to be 4 Ohm

It says it upscales to 4k on HDMI with Qdeo Technology by Marvell. Now I likely want to upgrade the receiver to the Denon AVR-S950H. I see this listed as it's power output:

# of Power Amps: 7
Power Output 8ohm 90W
Power Output 6ohm 125W
Power Output 6ohm 185W

Planning on upgrading in stages so my real question is would the existing Onkyo speakers and sub work with this new receiver or am I going to blow something up?

posted by PetiePal to Technology (2 answers total)

If you plug in the HTIB speakers like normal speakers and not through some weirdo connector, you'll be fine.

Assuming the HTIB speakers connect like normal speakers, the only "safety" thing you'd usually be concerned about is impedance, since lower-impedance speakers require more power to drive. But they're 6ohm speakers and the new one has reasonable ratings for 6ohm. Happy to be corrected here, but even if the HTIB speakers were 4ohm you'd still be fine as long as you remembered not to play at truly thunderous volume and maybe checked to make sure the receiver wasn't getting wicked hot.

You don't need to care about the impedance of the sub as your receiver isn't driving it.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:10 AM on August 28, 2019

Your sub is powered, so the impedance there isn't relevant. Assuming it has a preamplified RCA input (specs don't say) then you're golden there.

It looks to me like you'll be fine.
posted by neckro23 at 8:14 AM on August 28, 2019