Home Theater Advice

T

Tokpaler

Active member
I'm in the process of building a sub $2000 dollar home theater system. I've done some research and would love to hear your thoughts on them.

So far, I'm looking at the Onkyo TX-SR313 AV receiver and the Boston Acoustics A series for the speaker system (A250 floor standing speakers, A225C center, ASW250 subwoofers).

Not wanting to join another forum, I figured I'd post my question here and being filmmakers that we are, this might lead to some better insights :)

Thanks in advance!
 
Onkyo is a good brand. Can't go wrong with them or Denon.

I haven't heard much BA personally, but I can tell you for the same money you could get Polk Monitor series which are fantastic.

Honestly though, the best advice I can give you is to visit http://avsforum.com and take advantage of the wealth of info there. I haven't made a home electronics purchase in the past 5 years without vetting it there first.
 
I love my Onkyo, and I just bought one of the Home Theater in a Box packages that come with their own speakers. The Audessy room correction really works. Fully satisfied. If you have the space for it you might also want to consider a screen and projector. There are a lot of really good projectors now in the 1000 dollar range, with 3D.
 
I went with Sony 50" LED, Sony DN-1040 receiver and Samsung BF-5900 Blu-Ray player. You can get all that for under $2000.

Some highlights, and by no means all of them:

The Sony receiver is one of the few to upconvert analog composite signals or even component level signals to HDMI for easy hook up right to your TV. The amp even handles 4k apparently, like you need that. The amp has a "play-through" feature so sometimes if you want the AMP can be "off" but it will still route your video and sound straight to your TV and use your TV speakers. I call this "grandma mode" or "kiddie mode" which is good if people using the AMP don't know what they are doing, or you just simply don't want the surround sound speakers, etc..

The TV has smart, LED and 3D as standard features. Do you need all that? No of course not, but for the price and picture quality why not. This TV is great also in that if you use the apps built into the TV, or USB port to play media the TV will send audio back to your receiver incase you want to blast it through your home theatre setup. The receiver is also wi-fi and can read other sources in your house for media - including any apple device using "air play" to send your device sound straight through to your amp. It also features 7 (if I remember correctly) HDMI inputs which is ridiculously high, but hey why not? Sony just seems to think of everything.

The Samsung blu-ray player is also an amazing device capable of hooking up to the internet using wi-fi and can even connect to your home computer incase you want to stream movies, play music or view photos through your network. For the money the BF-5900 is a great little device. Although it does say it supports DIVX I could not get a single DIVX file to play, but luckily it works flawlessly with XVID encoded vidoes and if you download XVID of the internet the download comes with a small program that converts your DIVX encoded files into XVID without changing the file size or taking hours... it must just rewrite the headers of the video file because it only takes a minute to convert a 900MB file.

All and all I'm pretty happy with this setup, it was definitely under $2000 and I feel like I went all out and got the top end ****.
 
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Thanks for the input guys!

Honestly though, the best advice I can give you is to visit http://avsforum.com and take advantage of the wealth of info there. I haven't made a home electronics purchase in the past 5 years without vetting it there first.
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I have been lurking through their forum since I started building my home theater, just haven't had the gumption yet to actually post something there (I'm shy like that, lol!).

The thing about building a home theater is it relies so much on personal taste rather than objective observation. Not like when you're actually mixing the sound where everything has references and "objectives", or when you're shooting a film where the best gadgets, most often than not, wins over the not-so-better ones (i.e. 4k, RAW, Dynamic Range, etc...). Either that or I'm not really that familiar with this foray at all and mostly just rely on references and what-nots =b
I love my Onkyo, and I just bought one of the Home Theater in a Box packages that come with their own speakers. The Audessy room correction really works. Fully satisfied. If you have the space for it you might also want to consider a screen and projector. There are a lot of really good projectors now in the 1000 dollar range, with 3D.
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I haven't come across an Onkyo package in any Hi-Fi stores I've been to (in our neck of the woods) yet, but i'll ask them about it the next time I visit them. The projector is not an option right now since the setup is in our den where it is dim, though not dim enough because of the ambient light from other rooms. We do have a 2000 lumens projector though that is mostly regulated to corporate presentations. I set it up in the garden every once in a while if me and a bunch of my friends wants to watch a film al fresco.
I went with Sony 50" LED, Sony DN-1040 receiver and Samsung BF-5900 Blu-Ray player. You can get all that for under $2000.
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I actually went with a 43" Samsung 4+ series plasma display. Not entirely convinced by the LED TVs yet (I'm one of those people who adapt to new technology really late, lol!). Though I know the newer ones can match contrast and black levels with the plasma panels.

I'll look into that Sony receiver as well, but looking at its specs, 7.2 might be a bit too much for the space =b but if it's only a few dollars (Philippine Pesos, in my case) more expensive than a 5.1 setup then I might just be able to convince myself to spring for it! lol!
 
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