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avoid putting serious money into surround sound setup

Posted by JLivermore (A) on March 19, 2004 at 12:43:11

In Reply to: to 5.1 cheaply or costlier... posted by audiot on February 23, 2004 at 12:45:57:

if you're from the 2 channel audiophile world, you will have to spend serious $$$ to get average sound.

like others i have gone down this route, B&W 5.1 speaker setup, Sony ES reciever, etc etc. all that gear, all that cash (about $3.5k for speakers and reciever), all those wires. just wasn't worth it to me in terms of sound quality.

then i went for a very low end solution with one of those liftstyle surround systems for under $1.5k. that was even worse.

now i'm very happy with my A/V merge of systems. i've retained my 2 channel hifh system all tubes, i set my dvd player to downmix surround sound into 2 channel PCM and i route that to my 2 channel DAC. for tv sound, i simply use the stereo L/R analog outputs, and feed that directly into my preamp. voila, a successful merge between audio and video.

i'm absolutely amazed at the quality of sound engineering that goes into tv prductions in the last couple years. voices are dead center (like a center channel with out that silly speaker) and i get very good soundstage size, and depth. the only thing i miss are those spatial noises from the rears - which really doesn't bother me.

after spending nearly $4k on my surround sound setup, i was very dissapointed to hear the 'noises' coming out of my rear speakers. they were simply spatial cues which any pair of $100 radio shack speakers could have handled just fine. i remember when i was purchasing the B&W speaker set, i asked if i really needed to spend $650 for that matching set of speakers like the L/R fronts, and the dealer said 'you really want them to be the same'. heh, ya right! for surround sound SACD or DVD-A pherhaps, but for movies i'm not convinced.

i'm not sold on higher rez formats either, Redbook CDs sound just as good from what i've heard. my dac has no oversampling or digital filters.

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