I have found that the home theater kits usually suck. The speakers aren't as good as you'd get if you were to buy them separately, and you won't end up spending very much more on separate components. However, it's been years since I looked into it, so maybe the kits have gotten better.

Don't buy Bose! (Not that you want to spend that kind of money, anyway)

Buy Sony cautiously. They have a lot of varying levels of crap and goodness. Some stuff they label as top end sounds like wet dog farts, and some of their cheaper stuff is quite passable and a good buy.

What's wrong with your reciever now other than that it's probably it's just a 2 channel stereo, non-surround sound decoding model?

Consider buying a used 5.1 reciever and buying your subwoofer and satellites seperately.

Frankly, 2.1, 3.1 and 5.1 and related systems bug the crap out of me. Yeah, the bass is nice, and the clarity of the speakers is generally nice and crisp when compared to "old school" consumer midrange stereo pair setups.

But I'll never get used to the bass all coming from one source, and a lot of the x.1 woofer+satellite systems have ridiculously crappy midrange response and harsh, grating treble.

Give me a proper pair of big box, crossed over 3 ways or even a crappy pair of crossed-over and EQ'ed PA/pro audio grade sub/mid/tops any day. Or a quad setup like that with a decent center channel.

I guess that doesn't answer your question a all, weretable.

Try before you buy, or make sure you can return it after trying it for any reason. I hate how a lot of the "big box" stores like Best Buy, Good Guys, etc have absolutely shitty listening environments, and how they look at you like you're crazy if you want to test even that 50 dollar, 50 watt 2.1 computer speaker rig before you buy it.

It helps to have a reference to what good audio reproduction sounds like, too. If you don't think you have it, see if there's an audiophile club nearby. Ask them to point you to a good dealer with a good listening room and competent, non-snake-oil staff.

Having a trained and seasoned ear (or intuition, or confidence in judging what sounds good to you) is the best way to get the best value for your money.

What's wrong with your reciever now other than that it's probably it's just a 2 channel stereo, non-surround sound decoding model?

Well, it has really limited inputs and has had tons of use and I expect it will die any day now. But most importantly, it is part of a system with a big case, two huge speakers, etc. I want to get rid of that system entirely.

It helps to have a reference to what good audio reproduction sounds like, too. If you don't think you have it, see if there's an audiophile club nearby. Ask them to point you to a good dealer with a good listening room and competent, non-snake-oil staff.

I definitely don't have it. I listen to tons of music, but I know NOTHING about what to listen to it with. I do know that my old system sounds really lousy compared to the Logitech computer speakers I bought a year and a half ago.

Interesting -- we're just deciding to do the same thing -- get rid of the huge, clunky speaks and component rack.

Don't buy Bose!

Why not? We're looking at something like this as it would cut out the nifty wires our pup likes to chew on, also.

Mind you, I did well enough with two computer speakers hooked to a discman for months (while overseas on exchange), but we take our movies a little more seriously. But the giant rack + giant speakers... I bought those when I was 19, I think. Never again.

Bose, for the money, is extremely overrated crap. There's a reason why good audio companies generally don't make tiny little speakers, and why audiophiles generally dislike them.

But Bose in particular is mostly marketing.

I really wish someone who knew more science about audio repro would come in and answer this, but i'll give it a shot as best as I know...

You generally need speakers of specific sizes to reproduce different parts of the human-audible audio spectrum. Subs and woofers for the low and, medium range speakers for the bulk of the midrange and tweeters for the very high end. Each speaker corresponds by size in mass, size and volume of air moved per cycle to low end, middle and high end sounds.

There's undoubtably a formula for equating the size of the speakers, the enclosures and the amount of wattage going through them.

For "sound reinforcement" or "live PA" pro audio gear designed for concerts or nightclubs or the like, the speakers are huge. The subwoofers are generally in the 18" range and the enclosures can be fridge-sized or larger with multiple speakers in each unit. Midranges are in the 8, 10, 12 inches. High cabinets will have a 2" tweeter horn with a huge dispersal horn, often with their own 6-8" traditional voice-coil+cone speaker.

Pro audio engineers run banks of these speakers with banks of amps to power them. One of the things they'll do is bi-amp or tri-amp these arrays. They take the sound output from whatever source and run it through a crossover and EQ in the rack. Then each portion of the signal runs from the crossover to the appropriate array of amps (Lows and highs, or lows, mids and highs), and from the arrays of amps to the appropriate speakers.

(A crossover splits up the audio signal into low, medium, and high frequency components. Good home speakers do this internally. The reason why is so that low frequencies don't muddy the tweeter output, and vice versa)

So, back to these 5.1 home theater systems. I assume that a lot of the lower end ones try to emulate or work around the known solutions above. The pro audio application I described above is really just a big, complicated home stereo designed to vibrate and move lots of air around.

These digital amp/reciever combos also do 5.1 decoding, and STS/Dolby decoding, as well as sometimes doing effects processing that usually involves amounts of delay and/or reverb to give the listener effects that attempt to replicate listening to speakers in various environments. (Hall, concert, etc). As for these latter effects, as far as I've been able to tell they're mostly novelty and more noise in your output chain.

As for the former stuff, it's required for 5.1 sound, but a lot of it just doesn't seem to be executed very well.

Dedicated high end theater systems, high end or movie theater grade - probably have dedicated 5.1 surround sound decoders or even a totally different method of recording and playing back multichannel surround sound. (THX? STS?) And then their amplification and output chain is probably similar to the pro audio solution above. Big amps, big speakers. Not tiny, tinny little speakers with a single subwoofer to simulate the bass that a real multispeaker rig provides.

So. For what it's worth, weretable, you'd be better off rigging up your computer audio to your DVD player for now, and to save your money for better gear. Especially if all your stuff is already in one room.

Also for what it's worth, I only have crappy speakers here. I have a tolerable pair of amplified bookshelf monitors, and I have a 2.1 set of amplified desktop/computer speakers.

But I've heard *amazing* audio rigs where people were absolutely fastidious about their gear, the room it was listend to in, how it was mounted and presnted. Rigs where people have actually used white/pink noise tracks to tune the EQ against the speakers, amps and room itself for optimum, "flat" reproduction.

So I spend a lot of time tweaking my audio to eke out the best sound it can make with what little I have, and there's only so much you can do with your output levels and a software EQ.

Also, note what sound engineers use in recording studios. In a well equipped studio they generally use a single pair of "near field monitors". They tend to be medium-sized enclosures with a fairly large bass and/or midrange cone, and a tweeter. But they're designed for listen to up close, at lower to medium volume levels, not blasted loud. And they'll often have a few or more pairs of speakers for reference. A really high end pair for mastering and monitoring, and a crappy pair for listening to as though they were listening to the average home stereo, and then they master and mix the recorded music accordingly between the two.

Take a look at Onkyo s mid-range line, they ve got some pretty good stuff for not too much money. I put together a really good system awhile back for around $600.00 or so. Mid-range Denon audio video receiver and I think I spent around $250.00-300.00 that for, maybe $400.00 for the speakers and bass. Playing Minority Report s sonic gun encounter at full volume is enough to knock you back in your chair like one of the characters in the film. My media room is 13 X 12 if it helps to compare your area vs. mine. Sorry for the lack of apostrophes where appropriate, using the new version of Mozilla and its doing weird things. . .

I'm going to pick up an optical cable to go from the DVD player to the speakers and leave it at that for now, it dawned on me earlier that the main reason I want a receiver right now can be taken care of by my mp3 player. I hate being without a radio but my mp3 player has a tuner and line-out that I can use with the computer speakers when I wish.

I want rid of this old stereo but I do not have much cash on hand and with Christmas coming up... I was going to get something cheap, but I was comparing my speakers on my stereo with my little Logitech set by playing a few of the same songs (mp3s on the computer at 128 vs CDs) and the lossy-format mp3s sounded so much better through my computer than the CDs through the stereo. So now I am wondering what a better set than the logitechs would sound like.

I don't know anything about speakers and audio setups, but I can hear things with these speakers that I could not hear before - the same thing happened when I bought my i-river mp3 player. It came with Sammhein (sp?) earplugs and after ripping some mp3s from CDs that I own, I noticed I could hear things in the songs that I never heard before. That struck me as really strange, but I didn't think that much about it at the time.

SO I have decided that I should wait until I can get a nice receiver and some speakers better than what I can pick up at Best Buy or whatever. Does anyone have favorite audiophile-type sites that I could use to start learning more about what to look for down the road?