Patio Sound Setup Help

[pshrop]

We are finishing a renovation and I need to make a decision on how to set up my patio audio. I will have a TV mounted on a brick wall (wired with cat and 2-strand speaker wire) and 4 Klipsch ceiling speakers (2 front and 2 back). Everything is wired back to a cabinet where I’ll have either a Sony STR-DN1060 or Denon x2500 powering everything. The video feed into the receiver is from a C4 LU matrix. My question is what budget conscious center channel/sound bar would you recommend?

My challenge in making this decision is that I want to maintain the ability to listen to the TV with the ceiling speakers turned off. We have a bedroom above the patio and I don’t want sound to travel up through the floor when watching at night. Am I better off going with a powered sound bar? Or can C4 somehow tell a receiver to turn certain speakers on/off such that I can use a passive center channel and include ceilings when desired? If passive is an option, what would you recommend given the Klipsch center channels (if matching my ceilings) might not look very good mounted under the TV (too thick?). Sound bars are slimmer and would look better, but obviously don’t incorporate the ceilings.

I think I’m leaning toward a Klipsch active sound bar and abandon the speaker wire. I think I would have 2 watch options in C4 for the TV, one with the receiver off and just passing through the audio to the TV, which would power the sound bar and the other where the receiver is on, powering the ceilings, and the sound bar isn’t used. I’m not interested in having a subwoofer, but all the sound bars seem to come with them.

Does this make any sense? Any thoughts?

[OceanDad]

3 minutes ago, pshrop said:

Or can C4 somehow tell a receiver to turn certain speakers on/off such that I can use a passive center channel and include ceilings when desired?

You can certainly use C4 to issue a command to the Denon to select a specific sound mode.  Not sure if this will achieve exactly what you are looking to do, but that's where you should start.  I've attached a screenshot of the options for the x2500 in the IP driver .  Play around with the sound modes on the Denon - if you can make one of them do what you are looking for then this is easy.