Decided now that whole house HTPC build is complete it was time to upgrade the sound system in my living room. Put a Samsung PN58C7000 plasma on a wall mount last year but still had my mis-matched speaker set from various audio stages in my life. The only speaker I really liked in the old setup was my Polk CS1 center so I decided to build around that. I’ve always felt the Yamaha 7.1 receiver I had was more that enough for my use so I stuck with it. I bought it a few years ago on CL for $75 because someone had upgraded to HDMI switching and was just dumping their very good receiver.
Front Left/Right: Polk Monitor 40’s. Got them on a newegg sale for $99/pair shipped.
Rear left/right: Polk RM7’s. Got them on a newegg sale for $60/pair shipped.
Subwoofer: Dayton Sub-120. Parts-express house brand, on sale $105 shipped.
I was a little worried about the sub being a no-name house brand I’d never heard of but they had very good reviews. Originally I was going to stick with the Polk theme so everything matched but Polk sub reviews were horrible. I couldn’t be happier with how the sub-120 sounds once I played with the built in crossover a bit.
The biggest improvements are the subwoofer and the monitor 40’s. The subtle sounds that my old crappy JVC left/rights were missing jump out now (like the rain drops in Twister, or the bullet casings landing in the Matrix), and action movies literally shake my couch. The CS1 center brings dialog out nice and clear, something a lot of budget HT setups are terrible at. I had a friend over who had Stereo Advantage build his HT and he was clearly upset how much better my <$400 speaker set sounded than his insanely expensive system.
Definitely proves that if you have the time to wait for some deals you can build an amazing sounding system for not a lot of money.
i need to upgrade my stuff as well. I have a crappy RCA system i bought as in all in one. Now that I have the house i want to really do it nice…my living room is kind of set up funny so i want some flexibility with the rear surrounds, i thought about wireless but i have heard some negative things about them. I have a nice pioneer receiver that has all i need. i just want some better speakers all around
Unless you’re an audiophile, most of the “low-end” audio stuff sounds fine. I had Gus’s speaker system that was a no name %50 HT setup off eBay. It sounded pretty decent for being a no namer.
My house is a raised ranch so I was able to run speaker wire through the attic and back down to the rear surrounds. They’re mounted a little high for ideal audiophile placement but they sound just fine to me. I just ran a little more gain to them to make up for the extra distance.
The Dayton stuff from PE can actually perform quite well depending on the enclosures and cross-over designs. Their HT Sub kits are some of the best bang-for-the-buck subs out there.
A HT upgrade is in my future soon… I need a good HDMI switching Receiver, and my receiver is about 13 years old at this point. The 5.1 works fine, but I’m craving something better.
I was really close to going HDMI switching when I mounted the plasma on the wall but I realized it wouldn’t work well for me. I run my xbox with completely different settings on the TV than I use for TV and movies (higher brightness, game mode enabled, different black levels etc) and if I went to using one HDMI cable I’d have to change those each time I switched between xbox and TV. Using multiple cables my TV remembers all the settings for each input so I lost any desire to have my receiver handle the switching.
That makes sense then. My plan is to be running a projector again by that point and use a Logitech Harmony Remote, so when I change the source it will change the user-defineable presets on the projector if I need to tweak settings between sources.
$ / Value ratio goes down drastically as you break $1k. It turns into a “brand” and “style” cost, and nothing to do with 99% of the television you’re going to watch. The $10k 5.1 I priced out wasn’t worth 1k more, let alone 9.5k more.
If you’re doing it right things fall off more around the 10k mark IMHO unless you are building your own speakers then maybe 3-4k.
that’s not to say you can’t enjoy the hell out of cheap stuff, but there are some expenses you can’t get around like good amplification.
I’ve routinely had people with setups like the OP’s over to my house and had them leave hating their setups and hating me for showing them the difference. That said, I’ve had the same thing done to me plenty of times.
i might change my tune once i actually run my rear surrounds…I have hooked them up since i moved in the house. I will be doing that after christmas when I am on vacation. I will most likely be happy having full 5.1 system and not think about it for a while…this thread made me think of it lol