Connecting Integra-7 to surround system

[kpranav]

Has anyone tried connecting Roland Integra-7 to surround system? I already read pages 22 and 23 of Integra-7's owner manual and it is not clear how to connect to external speakers. When motional surround is ON, I could go 5.1 surround using L/R/C/Ls/Rs/LFE jacks. Each jack seens to be going to a speaker.

Questions:
1. What kind of cable are we talking about? Is it quarter inch that splits into naked L/R wires?
2. Does the speaker need to be powered speaker or any speaker would do? It doesn't mention anything about using an amp in the circuit.
3. Is there any surround speaker system in the market that will work out of the box with this Integra-7. If we take any amp/receiver as an example (say Denon A/V receiver) it takes a HDMI input and splits into 5.1 or 7.1 ports. If I want to use this receiver in the circuit, where would these connections go into the receiver? None of these A/V receivers have 5.1 as inputs so I am pretty confused about connecting these surround jacks coming out of Integra-7

Thanks,
Pranav

[Wonderer]

The L/R/C/Ls/Rs/LFE jacks are all unbalanced mono outputs that require to be connected to a 5.1 amp or powered speakers.

My Denon AVR 2106 (from 2006) has 5.1 channel external input via RCA connectors and works well the Integra.

The present Denon top model AVC-X8500H (very expensive) has 7.1 channel input via RCA connectors.
The present cheaper Denon models don't have 5.1 / 7.1 inputs afaik.

Hope this helps.

[kpranav]

Perfect! This is exactly what I was looking for. I wonder why Roland made it so complicated and not simply provided a optical out. Thank you!!

[andym72]

The reason the 5.1 audio isn’t provided over an Optical S/PDIF connector is that 5.1 over S/PDIF is always lossy compressed using either Dolby Digital or DTS.

And for recording or mastering you don’t want the output to be lossy compressed.

It’s possible to put 8 channels of uncompressed PCM audio over optical S/PDIF with the ADAT Lightpipe protocol, but I don’t know of a single surround sound amp that will accept Lightpipe data.

So the only option is 6 mono analog audio outs on the Integra, and an amp with individual analog channel inputs.

[Vladistone]

I use as an adding line mixer RSS by Roland "FM-186" to switch from TS-in to balanced TRS-out and then distribute to channels of active monitors (Roland DS-90A x4 and Roland DS-5 center channel and Yamaha SW-10 subwoofer)