Recommend me a surround sound system!

Stinky

Stinky

Stinky

Soldato
Joined
28 Mar 2005
Posts
9,254
Hi all

Looking to setup a surround sound setup in a gfs flat in a very large lounge I've been looking at the samsung htc 555 with 4 tallboy speakers! Very attractive system comes in around £300 mark!

I'll have up to £350 to spend on it, it doesn't have to be blu ray but does have to be tallboy speakers we can't stick anything to the walls! (she likes moving the room around all the time lol)

5.1 will be fine and looking for a lot of power bass and will handle loud stuff (no neighbours to worry about)

Any help is greatly appreciated
 
I had a Samsung system with the tallboy speakers. It was my first foray into home theatre systems and I thought it was great at the time; 8 months later it was sent back to Amazon after it started falling apart. Having replaced it with an Onkyo system, I can now say with confidence that the majority of the "single box" HT systems are rubbish. For £100-150 the quality you get is acceptable, but mine was £220 and it was very disappointing. Light, flimsy speakers, a large hollow receiver/DVD player with a noisy fan, and virtually no useful settings or options.

My advice would be to get something like the Onkyo HT-S3305, some speaker stands and a stand-alone BD player. The Onkyo can be had for around £250 now so it's well within budget, and it'll be a much better system than anything Samsung or the like can offer.
 
Hmmm very interesting I thing Is I'm after quality as well as the style and speaker stands don't tend to offer anything that good looking maybe I am wrong I will look into it tonight when I'm home though!

Thanks for your input much appraicTed!
 
One word of warning: Samsung stuff looks very nice in pictures, but I'd recommend making a trip to a store and see a few in person. I really liked the look of mine from photos, until I actually opened it up at home and realised it was just a a load of cheap empty plastic.
 
Yea I picked that one out from a main store but they had no stock so thought I'd ask u guys for recommendations before I ordered online :)
 
Stinky said:
Hmmm interesting! Do tell more ;)
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A tapped horn will give you a lot of SPL for not too much cash, but the main drawback if you have to make them pretty damn big in order to go below 30Hz.

Here's one I made earlier, this thing is 6ft6, but it sounds awesome... :D

imgp1354nx7.jpg

(The speaker goes in that hold on the bottom, and I have now glued the side panel on...)

Overall it cost me around £200 to build, but it performs as well if not better than commercial products costing ten times as much!
 
for £350, i would say pass on "5.1 lifestyle speaker packages", they just sound small and inadequate + usually impossible to upgrade down the line

best start with get 2 decent bookshelf speakers and amp. down the line, you can always add a center speaker, a sub and some rears. (or floorstanders and demote the first set as rears ;)) you will in the end get much much better sound.

read this this posts it is really good imo
http://www.avforums.com/forums/spea...festyle-speaker-package-lengthy-rambling.html

EDIT: with your budget it may be worth looking at second hand stuff to maximize bang for buck. Avforums has tons of stuff regularly
 
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You could buy something decent like the Onkyo 5305 or 3305 bundle, and a separate blu-ray player for similar money. It would be more flexible in terms of inputs/outputs and no doubt sound a lot better!

Granted, av receivers aren't the prettiest items, but once sitting in the right bench/unit they actually look ok.
 
Ok so I'm now looking at av receivers to start with and am being drawn to the pioneer vsx 920 which is around what I wanted to spend on the lot lol anyone got one and got thoughts on it! Or anything better for cheaper?
 
Stinky said:
Ok so I'm now looking at av receivers to start with and am being drawn to the pioneer vsx 920 which is around what I wanted to spend on the lot lol anyone got one and got thoughts on it! Or anything better for cheaper?
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personally love my Pio avr, but i have a beefier model so can't comment on the 920, but it seems to be really good/bang per buck and seriously well discounted

anyway ask Argis what he thinks of the 920, he just got one and sampled some others before buying http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18229123
 
I was contemplating the Pioneer 920, and the 520 too, mainly because they get good user comments on the AVForums, and because they look stunning. I decided against them in the end though, because they don't do audio pass through in standby, and they don't do HDMI audio return. I've settled on a Denon AVR 1611 for £229 in the end and will probably order early next week.

If you like the Pioneer 920 though, you could consider the 520 which I've seen for £200.

As for speakers, I don't have the space for floor standing speakers / tallboys, so I'm going to get the Canton Movie 80CX, but for I while I thought I might have been able to squeeze these Teufel tallboy/floor standing speakers in. They also get positive feedback on the AVForums, plus Teufel give you 8 weeks to send them back if you don't like them, they even pay postage on the return.
 
I really do like that teufel concept r 2, shame it comes with no cables at all!

Suddenly my budget seems to have doubled lol
 
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Stinky said:
I really do like that teufel concept r 2, shame it comes with no cables at all!

Suddenly my budget seems to have doubled lol
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If you can and want to spend more then by all means do, but considering you were almost going to end up with a Samsung system not two days ago, you don't necessarily need to be spending massive amounts. People on here will happily spend money for you that you don't have!
 
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