I'm moving into my own apartment next week near the university I study at. I'm planning on setting up a pretty nice home theater system and I would like some advice. I've already bought all the video components I need. This is what I have so far:

• Sharp M20X DLP Projector (front projector, 4:3, 1024x768, 3x color wheel)
• ReplayTV 4504 (I bought the refurbished unit a few days ago from replaytv.com. I preferred the 4000 series over the 5000 because the 4000 has a RGB VGA out instead of component which is more convenient for my projector)
• A PC with a DVD drive (PC can do better scaling then a normal DVD player to output in the projectors native 1024x768 progressive, good for playing computer games on the big screen and playing DivX movies as well)
• Sega Dreamcast (has VGA out)
• Nintendo Gamecube (has a component out 480p signal)
• I bought all the cables and switch boxes needed to connect these 4 devices to my projectors single DVI-I port

So video is complete, now I need to get a good sound system, and I'm not sure what would be best. I would like to get a 5 speaker surround sound system. I have a max of $900 to spend on it. I also currently have a Bose Acoustimass 3 in my bedroom that I think would make good rear surround speakers in my new setup. Its 2 Bose single cubes (not direct/reflecting) and a 6" sub with a max of 100 watts per channel. I definetely want to stay away from Bose for the rest of the system in regards to their ridiculous price and rather poor bass response. Is it a good idea in regards to quality if I mix brands by having Bose in the rear and something else in the front, or should I scrap my Bose idea?

I'm thinking I want my 2 front speakers to be floor standing speakers with a 10" low, 5" midrange, and 2" for high range sounds or some other measurement along those lines. I think these types of speakers still provide superior quality to the cube+sub speakers that have become so popular now. But what brand would be best for my budget? And what should I get for the center speaker (and rear if Bose is bad)?

What kind of receiver should I get? I need one that supports 5 speakers, Dolby Prologic I and II and Digital, has 2 or more component inputs, and digital connections. I also need a new sound card for the computer that supports surround sound. Do digital sound connections carry surround sound? If so, I think one with optical outputs might be best as past experience taught me that connecting a computer to an audio system always introduces ground loop noise. Are there sound cards like that?

I have a 10% off purchases over $200 in Circuit City coupon that excludes Polk, Bose, and Velodyne in its small print. So I could make use of that for at least a receiver (and speakers if I don't get Polk or Velodyne).

I would like to get a 5 speaker surround sound system. I have a max of $900 to spend on it.

That's not going to be enough to do it "right", where by that I mean getting a Dolby Digital/DTS receiver with all the bells and whistles, and a bunch of good (i.e., non-Bose) speakers. At your price range, there's no way you're going to have 10" woofers or anything close. To do that sort of thing, you're looking at $1500-2500 for the pair of main speakers minimum.

My recommendation, given your tight budget, is to build your system in stages. Start off with a reasonable 5-channel receiver from your favorite Japanese vendor and add a pair of main speakers. This will probably come in under $1000. Then add in the surround speakers and a powered subwoofer later. In fact, some stores may give you (crappy) surround speakers for free. Your Bose "cube" speakers count as "crappy" for the purposes of our discussion.

Back when I was a grad student, my receiver was taken out by a lightning strike. I replaced it with a $450 Yamaha floor demo receiver, and they threw in a center, two rears, and all the necessary cabling. I quickly disabled the crappy center speaker, putting the amp into "phantom" mode, only using my two main speakers (quality Mission 2-way bookshelf speakers) and the two crappy rears. This worked fantastically.

I haven't priced out receivers lately, but I'll bet you can get Dolby Digital and DTS decoding somewhere in the $500-700 range. Toss in $350 or so for a reasonable pair of bookshelf speakers (go audition lots of them), and you've hit your budget.

One extreme example: a family friend has a pair of Klipschorns -- monstrous, huge, terribly impressive speakers. When he went to 5.1, he added a Klipsche center, some other subwoofer, and these tiny rear speakers from Boston Acoustics. I can't seem to find the model number right now, as Boston Acoustics web page seems to be down, but these things were barely larger than computer speakers. The trick is they're bidirectional (also called "dipole" speakers). They have cones firing in opposite directions. This helps diffuse the sound so you get less directionality / better ambience.

Myself, I've now got five speakers from VMPS Audio, a small California firm. My main speakers, RM2's, weigh 150 pound each and go happily down to 20Hz with their 12" woofer -- no real need for a subwoofer. My center and rear speakers are 626 Ribbon speakers. These have 8" woofers and ribbon midrange and tweeters. A pair of these would probably set you back something like $700-800, and would make for excellent main speakers in your apartment. You could drive them with a standard amp, but you're now breaking your budget by 50%. If you could afford it, though, that's what I'd recommend.

Is this $900 the most you ever want to spend on the audio system or are you willing to put more money in later as your budget allows? You will obviously end up with a better system in the end if you follow DWallach's advice.

If you want to spend $900 it is possible to get what I consider an acceptable surround sound system. (I could live with it as a bedroom system.) I just helped a friend put together a system like this. On my recommendation, he bought the Energy Take 5.2 speaker package and a Yamaha receiver. It sounds about as good as you could expect for $900.

-Dylan

And in addition to Yamaha, I've read that Kenwood has some pretty good receivers for pretty darned cheap.

I'll offer a suggestion for the lower end (as opposed to what is evidently "right," aka: "expensive").

I like Klipsch speakers a lot. The ProMedias work great for computers, and the similar system for home theaters would be the Quintets. However, if I were stepping up my system from crappy Radio Shack speakers to a decent set, I'd probably go to the Synergy system. (review)

The company also has some great stuff on their website. I've noticed that Best Buy has even started to carry Klipsch home theater speakers.

Thanks for your suggestions. $900 is what I have to spend right now, so buying in stages is a pretty good idea, I think I'll do that. $2000 is the limit I'm setting for myself though, I don't want to spend more then that. I'll look into some of the speakers and receivers you guys suggested.

By the way, every time I want to feel better about my crappy $30 Optimus Radio Shack speakers, I go visit this store which is in my home town about 2 miles away from me.

We were in there the other day looking at stuff (I could never do more than just look at stuff), and we knew that everything there was really expensive. Well, they had these two RCA cables lying around (that's two single cables, as in a left and right cable). Well, these things were quite massive, though not their top-of-the-line. We guesstimated, based on everything else in the store, that they were probably $200 each. Apparently it was $2500 for the pair.

Damn, I really need to get into the cable making business. Hacking spaghetti perl just doesn't pay that well.

Matthew

Apparently it was $2500 for the pair.

Ahh, the world of esoteric inexplicable high-end audio.

To keep audio noise down, you don't need expensive cables. You just need shorter cables. Likewise, audio frequencies are so low that cable quality is largely irrelevant, but video frequencies are another matter entirely. Particularly for longer cable runs, you might see a visible improvement for using higher quality cabling.

In my system, I'm running "Radio Shack Gold" cables. They have nice gold-plated connectors, I'm told they "test well" (whatever that means), and they're cheap. For my speakers, I'm running Home Depot 12ga wire. It's oodles cheaper than audiophile wire, and it will handle more than enough power. I crimped the cables with generic U-shaped connectors, also from Home Depot. Works fine, costs peanuts. I've heard some people use electrical "zip" wire (normally intended for running the 120V A/C to outlets). That will also sound fine, but it tends to be solid core, making it somewhat inflexible, which can be a problem if space is tight behind your amp.

The two biggest things that effect audio quality are the speakers and the room they're in. Moving the speakers around physically can have a massive difference in quality, and all it costs you is the time to move them around and listen to the effects. Having a good amp does make a difference, particularly at higher volumes, but unless you're buying seriously esoteric speakers, yee olde Japanese receiver has all the power you'll ever need.

(Side note: if you're serious about making things sound good, another important issue is your noise floor. You'll have a possibly loud fan in your video projector. You've got your air conditioning. You may have a hardwood floor or glass windows that make the room more "live". Adding rugs, window coverings, and other such things can make a big difference.)

You just need shorter cables

Heh, I forgot to mention that these cables were about three feet long

The stuff in that store is insane, though. They come from the vacuum tube and vinyl school of audio. They also maintain the philosophy of efficient power usage, which makes sense to me, but not at those prices. The had a setup that was incredibly loud, but it was only being powered by 5 watts. Of course, that was on $11,000 speakers (each). I recommend that everyone go to this store to feel much better about themselves, because the fact is you probably aren't going to hear the difference between this stuff and some very good equipment (like the stuff you're suggesting, Dan).

Fortunately, the guy working there has some common sense, and he recommended some good, "low" cost cables to me (he called Monster "crap"). Has anyone heard of Kimber? I looked at their website and it looks like good stuff. I would buy it but the difference I hear in my crappy speakers would be nil.

Talking about vinyl school...

A friend of mine has a CD demagnitizer that he used to use regularly. He even knew that the CD was made from aluminum and plastic, but he still used it.

Now he is on a vinyl craze. All of his CDs sound like crap, and he won't listen to them anymore.

Now he is on a vinyl craze. All of his CDs sound like crap, and he won't listen to them anymore.

I finally got things set up so I can rip my vinyl and clean it up digitally. It's amazing how much good can be done even by the simple "trainable" noise removal filter that's part of Audacity. Vinyl purists seem quite happy to ignore the pops and the hiss of vinyl. Likewise, vinyl is generally equalized to get around physical limits in the vinyl, and many people find that equalization pleasant. It's that "warmer sound" after all.

Also, there's a massive quality difference between recent vinyl and older stuff. As vinyl ages, it seems to get a whole lot noisier. CDs have their own aging problems, but if you rip it before it physically deteriorates, then you're fine.

I don't know, I have a bunch of older vinyl and then a few from the 90's and within the past few years. The newer ones sound like crap. Sure, they aren't scratched, but they seem to have been recorded differently.

I much prefer my old Nat King Cole LPs. Damn that man is great (both voice and piano).

I can still believe that CDs cannot accurately record/reproduce the incredibly high overtones some instruments make, like those of a violin or a flute, and the sound could be affected by that. I realize that humans probably cannot hear those tones directly, but they might interact with each other and the fundamental in such a way as to produce different timbres in person, in an analog recording and in a CD recording. So I can believe that chamber and possibly classical music can sound significantly different depending on the medium.

That does not mean that I can determine those differences, nor do I believe that most modern music has the requisite criteria for that sort of loss to occur. But I can believe that some people can hear it.

What I have a problem with is when people are being told that these $2500 cables are going to improve their listening enjoyment, when there is, at most, probably 0.1% of the population that can hear those differences. At that point, it's just about pretentious luxury spending, and bilking people out of their money, not about sound quality.

I can still believe that CDs cannot accurately record/reproduce the incredibly high overtones some instruments make

But microphones can't capture it, anyway. Still, it makes sense to use higher resolution (both bits per sample and samples per second) in the mastering phase to generate the best possible CD at the end.

If you really want higher quality, then the current buzz seems to be around super audio CDs (SACDs) and DVD-Audio. A friend of mine has all of this set up with a stereo system that costs as much as a good car (Piega speakers, some sort of new esoteric subwoofer, a Nakamichi amp, Sony SACD transport, and variously overpriced interconnects). The intersection of his tastes (classic rock, classical music) with mine left only one album I really knew well - Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. When they remastered it for 5-channel audio, they went out of their way to hit you from all sides. Time has the bells ringing everywhere. Likewise, Money has cash registers chinking at you front, back, and side. Very impressive with lots of fun bling-bling, but there's debate about the quality of the mastering. It certainly sounded good, but we didn't do an A/B test between this and the original CD mix.

When they remastered it for 5-channel audio, they went out of their way to hit you from all sides. Time has the bells ringing everywhere.

They did that live when Roger Waters played Glastonbury last year (the Pyramid stage got a quadrophonic sound system). It ruled. There was another one with dogs barking all around, which didn't half confuse a real dog in the audience. Mind you, yet another had a helicopter panned all around the soundstage, at authentic volume, and it didn't half confuse all the people in the audience...

Peter

Absolutely, Bitt. Sadly, that is the area I live in, where there are some people who will fork over a fortune for the sake of having such an expensive system. There was an article about it in the Post last year, about people who spent upwards of $200,000 on their home stereo systems ALONE. I also love hanging out at that store, because much of the time, there are salesmen in there who know that I can't buy any of this stuff, and who also know how ridiculous it all is. They told me some great stories.

One was about a guy who used these huge line conditioners, because of course the power going through your house will affect your stereo to all hell. First he decided that these devices (he had two of them) needed to be placed in sandboxes for minimum interference. They told me his next step was to operate on his fridge so that it didn't affect the house's power as much.

Then there were the stories about people like the guy who hand built dozens of little stands, hooked fishing line to them, and suspended all the cables running to his various components, because there was too much interference from the ground.

Like you said, even if the physics of it all dictates that these methods and equipment do affect the sound, chances are it will be so minimal that many of the things these people do will not matter, because they cannot hear it. Perhaps there is a monk somewhere in Asia that is so in tune with the universe that he can hear the minor change in the soundwaves, but chances are he won't be buying the $10,000 equipment so he can hear Norah Jones that much clearer.

That said, Norah Jones sounded pretty damn good on this stuff I'm not saying it doesn't sound great, just that if I went over and listened to a well-tuned $2000 complete stereo system, I probably couldn't tell the difference.

I go by what I've come to call the "Rule of Tens" (although it's pretty similar to an existing precept of "the law of vanishing returns," or something like that). 10 percent of listeners can hear the difference between a $1000 system and a $10,000 one; 10 percent of them can hear the difference between the $10,000 one and a $100,000 one. By doing some fairly simple tests in stores like you've described, I've determined I'm in the second group, hence my own just-under-5-figure expenditure.