Home Theater Speaker System Questions?

Virgil Loatman: Ok - a few concepts: You dont need 100+ watts of power for a home theater system. For music yes as you often want to knock people over in the next room. But for movies you circle the room with smaller, efficient speakers (not DJ/Concert hall speakers). Too much power just over-whelms the sound field. Look into the Onkyo TX-SR series of receivers. Lots of options for a line that starts at about $400. Go for one of the higher end units about $700. Subwoofer: This is the secret to a powerful and impressive home theater. Some of the best quality and value is from either SVS Woofers or HSU Research. The guys who founded SVS used to help people design and build their own subs. They also praised HSU subs and I liked the honesty they showed so I bought SVS. Very few people ever regret buying SVS. Plan to spend about $800 on the sub but it will impress. Thats about $1,500 gone/$1,500 left. You should have no trouble hitting the stores and auditioning a 5 speaker se! t for that money. Take along a favorite CD (not crappy compressed MP3 and not a DVD but music. ) Music is a tougher task for speakers and will show flaws and flavor. One caution: only consider speakers from a company that makes speakers as their main business. They tend to be better, hold their tone longer and be more accurate. Also - speakers have 'flavor'. Just because I like my Definitive Technologies you might prefer the sound of Klipsch or Paradigym. It does not mean any one is 'better' than the other. Buy what you prefer with a music CD you love and you will be fine for home theater. (Actually - I have installed some pretty cheap speaker systems for friends that give a great HT experience. Something about movies just does NOT require the high sensitivity of music caliber speakers.) Hope this helps....Show more

Troy Monsivais: Just looking at the connections it looks like you could do it, however some of those systems are not what they seem, some times they will ! only put stereo sound out to two speakers not all five or only! the internal DVD is played in surround I would recommend getting a dedicated receiver like the Sherwood RD 5405...what you would need to do is run an additional cable from your devises to the surround in analog, this may create another problem though latency..there is a possibility that you could run one optical cable from the TV to the surround and get sound from all your equipment but I cannot guarantee that will work....and if it does work it may not produce the bass or quality that you desire......Show more

Tomeka Hameen: You need the cable with 3 colours

Travis Sherrock: My answer is based on assuming all of the devices you wish to hear out of your home theater system are already hooked up to your HDTV.Yes it is possible to do what you ask. What you would need to do is hook up the digital optical audio output of your HDTV to the digital optical audio input of the home theater system. This will pass all of the audio from the tv to your theater system. HO! WEVER there is one thing that will NOT happen if you do this - you will NOT get 5.1 surround sound for most devices that output 5.1 surround sound. I don't know the reasoning behind this, but anything that has surround sound capability and is hooked up via HDMI to your tv will only output 2 channel stereo through the optical output of the tv. Anything you get via the tv tuner (ATSC and QAM) will be 5.1 surround sound. So if you want surround sound from any of your equipment that has that capability you will have to route it to your home theater system instead.I hope this helps you....Show more