Need more sound!

[Calum]

Hi all,

Like many, I've been watching movies more than ever in the past few months but I wish the sound was a bit more immersive.

I've found a bit of money down the back of the sofa and am looking to improve things.

My surrent setup is: LG 55 b8 oled, Denon X520bt and 2 Dali Zensor Picos. See below

I would ideally like to upgrade to a 5.0 or 5.1 system (subwoofer less vital in my terraced house!) but my wife doesn't like the ideas of cables running everywhere.

Would I be better off adding in speakers or just selling it on and going for a Sonos system instead?

Thanks!

 

[fredwi]

It depends how much you want to go down the route of home cinema

if you really want the best you can get go separate speakers

sonus if you want ease and good sound depending who you talk to and tbh this option will probably set you back more

 

[lucid]

With your current system, adding a centre first, and larger front speakers, will make a big change in the sound you're getting.

This would leave the current from speakers free to be repurposed as surrounds. The catch obviously is the pair of speaker wires to drive those rears. Getting a trade in to help hide them is a possibility.

Going Sonos gives you the convenience of wireless rears, and the start of the Sonos ecosystem if you fancy multiroom music - and for this it's a good system - but your trade-off is that their products don't support anything like the variety of audio formats you have as standard with the AV receiver. (Bet you never even gave a second thought to whether your amp supports DTS / Dolby True HD / DTS-Master Audio, or maybe 192 kHz 24-bit; you just played whatever you want.) The Sonos sound bars are far more limited.

These limitations have been largely to do with what the sound bars connect to, which is mostly TVS. Those TVs haven't really supported much other than Stereo PCM or DD up to 5.1, but things are changing. DTS compatibility is creeping in the TVS nd of course BD and UHD discs have a lot of DTS sound tracks.

There is a way you can have it all though.

Certain brands of AV receivers also support multiroom audio, and so use Wi-Fi connected wireless speakers for that. Those same speakers can be retake as wireless rears, and so in the same kind of layout that you've seen with Sonos, a pair of wireless speakers can act as the surround channels for those suitable amps.

Denon calls it's wireless speaker system HEOS. There's one HEOS AV receiver capable of driving the Denon HEOS wireless speakers. It doesn't look like a conventional Denon AV receiver. Google "Denon HEOS AVR" and you'll see what I mean.

Yamaha is a bit further down the road with this. Their system is called Musicast. There are a couple of Musicast wireless speakers; kind of equivalents in form to the Play1 and Play speakers. several of the AV receivers are Musicast compatible. There's more info on the system here: https://hub.yamaha.com/musiccast-wireless-surround-the-next-chapter-in-home-theater/