Looked through the section, saw nothing about this.... Also three drinks in, so didn't read *that* close. Anyway. I have an Insignia 55" HD TV. It's SWEET. Except: The sound blows fucking goats. With modern thin-profile TVs comes rear mounted speakers. Rear mounted speakers are probably OK (meaning, they suck cock) if you're on a flat wall that reflects sound. I have a window on either side. Alas, no reflection. So, I bought a Samsung (OMG Samsung is the shit!) Blu-ray/5.1 system. Except it's not the shit, it IS shit. I'm watching Avengers right now. The picture is Blu-ray beautiful. The sound is fucking AWFUL. Yeah, I don't have the ideal ratio (7:14:7 or some such shit) for the room, but damn, you'd think I could hear the movie with the volume less than 3/4 max. I checked with my kids, I'm not old, the sound is not what you'd expect from a center channel, 2 front, 2 rear and a subwoofer. FOCUS What's your home theater set-up? Also, what do you recommend or have seen as a package that works together well?
The PA I have for my guitar also provides TV and computer sound... it's rather... substantial. Mackie 16 ProFX mixer, with a couple of self-powered 15" speakers (JBL Eon 615's) and a 16" self-powered sub with crossover. It won't do 5.1 or anything like that, but it will knock the pictures off the walls and break dishes that are in the sink.
That's a sweet set-up... I forgot to mention that I'm married, so every speaker must be the size of a motherfucking dixie cup.
And captions for the kids? Seriously though, unless I go on crutchfield and get in the wall paintable surround sound speakers, the glossy black plastic shit they sell with every home theater system is an eyesore.
I decided on keeping things simple and just bought a decent soundbar. It's surprisingly decent, low profile, and frankly, I value simplicity a lot in my life right now. I mention it because you can buy soundbars in a huge range of qualities right now, and given their relative attractiveness compared to speaker sets, you might be able to swing something really nice that would still satisfy the wife. I think the trend towards making built-in speakers useless is obnoxious. You buy a TV that's half an inch thinner than last year's, and now you also have to buy a 3" tall soundbar to replace the speakers.
My sound bar is something like 5 years old and works wonderfully. I keep saying I am going to get a 5.1 system but never do, I will probably eventually at some point but the sound bar works so well.
Sonos makes a great sound bar. They're a little bulky compared to some others, but the sound quality is exceptional. The other good thing about Sonos is that you can expand the system over time. (Add subwoofers, surrounds, rear surrounds, ect.) I'm in the process of installing a home theater in the new house we're building, which will be rather extensive, but I'm going to use Sonos speakers for the rest of the house for all our TV and music needs.
This is what my dad put in a couple of years ago, and it's fantastic. Very simple to use with normal watching (nothing special needs to be done, control-wise, so it's "mom-proof"), but if you get the app you can do so much more with it. Sounds is great.
Sonos is nice for simplicity and it's really high quality. My only real beef with them is that they have one single input on their speakers, otherwise you have to buy one of their expensive bridges. If you have just one source, that's great. Or, if you have a receiver. Or if you have a fancy HDMI switch that does all of the proper negotiation. Unfortunately, a ton of TVs don't pass a full Dolby Digital 5.1 (or greater) signal out of their optical output, so you often can't just plug all of your sources into the TV and then plug the TV into the Sonos if you want real surround sound. My brother-in-law works at Sonos so I can get a discount on them. I looked really hard at it, but the actual net increase in value over a nice-but-not-Sonos sound bar just didn't satisfy me. I can beam sound directly to it, which is nice. But a $35 Chromecast lets me beam sound directly to any soundbar I want. I can expand it into a wireless surround sound system, which is also nice, but I don't think I'm actually going to do that - and if I do that, and my TV doesn't pass 5.1 (it doesn't), then I also need a receiver or an HDMI switch that has an optical out which properly negotiates HDCP (many of them don't). And if I do all of that, why am I going Sonos instead of just regular speakers for a lot cheaper? None of this applies to a lot of people, it just seemed pretty rigid for me personally, and they're definitely costly. Very, very nice system, though.
Long and McQuade scratch-and-dent sale... got them for pennies on the dollar, and there's no way I could just not buy them. Couple them with my generator and there have been a couple of kick-ass jam sessions up the side of a remote BC mountain. Nothing better than fishing during the day, and drinking/jamming at the "campsite" at night.
L&Q gets a lot of business from me. I guess it's as close as we get to Guitar Centre. As you just said, they will give you great speaker deals. Recently from there I grabbed a couple Yorks on a steal for my daughter's dance school that could screw up the earth's rotation. They can put such power into such little size now. Fifteen years ago used to need a dolly to move powered JBL speakers around, they were over four feet tall. Now I can pick one up and scratch my back with it.
I could not agree more with this. The sound bar with a sub is all I have in my living room but I have a small speaker in my kitchen, my bedroom, my basement, and two on my patio that act as my theater system for my outdoor TV. The ability to have the sound from the tv or whatever music I'm listening to in multiple rooms, for instance cooking in the kitchen, is pretty cool. Once it's set up adding a speaker is a breeze too.
Full disclosure: I had part of it installed so I'm not entirely sure but I have the sonos controller (not sure that's the proper term) hooked up to my router/wifi and then a bridge in the basement that runs the speakers outside, specifically the tv input from my dish receiver inside the weatherproof box I bought to protect the TV. I can control it all from the app but I think it only has one bridge, unless the main box also acts as one? (probably)
The box hooked up to your router is a wireless bridge, but you need either one of their large speakers (Play:5), or their soundbar, or their "CONNECT" bridge, to actually provide an input to pipe sound into the system. Basically, any place you have a physical audio source, you need one of those three things to give you a physical audio input to hook it up. But the CONNECT is $350, so it's not like there's a cheap way to just hook up every audio source in your house to your Sonos system, unless all of your audio sources already go to one receiver.
Well, it wasn't cheap and it sounds like I have both the wireless bridge and the connect bridge. It's so easy to use that I think it was worth the cost, especially for what I'm doing with it, but there are a ton of different ways to do something similar for less money.