{"id":3883,"date":"2019-05-26T10:24:58","date_gmt":"2019-05-26T14:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=3883"},"modified":"2019-05-29T10:29:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T14:29:12","slug":"surround-sound-upgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2019\/05\/surround-sound-upgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Surround Sound Upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back in 1999 I got my first surround sound system, a “home theater in a box” by Aiwa consisting of a receiver and 5 speakers, so that I could enjoy surround sound from my DVD’s. Surround sound isn’t mind blowing, but it is pretty neat, kind of underwhelming given all the hype, not that I was spending huge amounts of money. I’m not sure why I felt the need, but in 2007 I upgraded to an Onkyo system<\/a> with 7 speakers and a subwoofer. Even today most Blu-ray movies don’t have 7.1 audio, but I felt like I would be missing out. And the subwoofer adds a lot of oomph to explosions while also filling in the low frequency sounds that small speakers have a hard time producing. It was a nice system and worked well in a pre-HDMI era where all of the sound was carried over RCA cables instead of HDMI cables (so many wires!), but when my old pre-HDMI TV died in 2017 it was time for another upgrade<\/a>. Rather than spend twice as much for another home theater in a box, I just got a new Denon receiver and kept the Onkyo speakers and subwoofer. The Denon receiver was neat because it came with a microphone that you would put in different places in the room and the receiver would come up with the best settings. I’m not sure if it is just equalizing the speakers, syncing them up, or something more advanced, but it is a great idea.
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It is 2 years later and I am thinking the 10 year old speakers could probably use an upgrade. There is a lot of advice on the internet and a lot of user experiences and I think you have to filter it a little. People said that when it comes to speakers, you need to spend the most on the subwoofer. I’ve seen subwoofers for $100, but they feel like the price points are $300 for a decent one, $500 for a good one, and $1000 and up for a really good one. Oh, and they think you should buy two.<\/p>\n

The second most important speaker is the center channel since that is where most of the sound in a movie comes from. I looked around at Boston Acoustics, Klipsch, and Polk, but was open to others. I wound up choosing a Polk CSiA6 for $240. The third most important speakers are the front left and right, and it probably isn’t a bad idea to match the fronts to the center, so I will get Polk RTi A3’s for the front, which combined will cost about the same as the center. <\/p>\n

For the other 4 surround speakers, I didn’t want to spend that much (some people use the Polk RTi A3’s for surrounds and pick bigger RTi’s like the floor-standing A5, A7, or A9 for the fronts), and found some small speakers that people seem impressed with called NHT SuperZero 2.1. All 4 of those will cost about what the center speaker cost, but should be a good upgrade from what I have.<\/p>\n

I went ahead and ordered the center channel from Crutchfield, who had a good price and are good to work with. I had some bonus points from a previous purchase, but they weren’t enough to trade in for a $5 discount. So I bought just the center speaker, which will give me enough points to save $5 when and if I buy the fronts from them (seems silly, but it also kept me from just jumping in without considering all the options first). And in the meantime, I bought two of the NHT surrounds, figuring I could use them temporarily as fronts to see how they sound. I got the NHT’s lightning fast from Amazon and am still waiting on the center. In a month I could get the fronts.<\/p>\n

The subwoofer is the big question mark. Some say that a $250 off brand one sounds just as good as a $350 brand name one (Klipsch or Polk) and neither can hold a candle to a $500 one. But I don’t want to spend $500, so may end up with a $200 one. It is very frustrating to read forums where people say they have a $300 limit on a subwoofer and immediately people tell them they need the $500 one and that it will sound a lot better, which it should since it is nearly twice as much. And forget about buying two, though the Denon receiver does support that. That’s what you have to watch out for on the internet: people there always push you to spend more money. With the subwoofer and really the whole system, there is a lot of fine tuning involving getting the best sound with different placement of the various speakers. This is especially true of the subwoofer, which I always thought could be put pretty much anywhere, but people say the subwoofer chooses its location, not you. The danger is I buy good components, but then end up with something that sounds much worse than it could have if I had made a small change or could place the speakers better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back in 1999 I got my first surround sound system, a “home theater in a box” by Aiwa consisting of a receiver and 5 speakers, so that I could enjoy surround sound from my DVD’s. Surround sound isn’t mind blowing, but it is pretty neat, kind of underwhelming given all the hype, not that … Continue reading “Surround Sound Upgrade”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3883"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3889,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883\/revisions\/3889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}