Social Feed

bhelms said:

Tks, all! Well, I pulled the trigger on Sat. I ended up with that Sony 5300 receiver, and Paradigm Monitor 9s in the front, Titans in the rear, CS-290 in the center, and a 3200 sub. Went with 14-ga. wire to the speakers (except coax to the sub). 50' runs to the rears was the worst case. (They're not that far back but I'll need that much wire to run through the basement.) The current "rears" are actually in the surround positions and the receiver is configured accordingly. If I eventually add the surround backs I'll probably go with the Titans again. I actually considered going with the Monitor 11s for the fronts, but frankly I didn't like their sound. The 1" larger drivers gave more emphasis to the bass and I thought that really "muddied" the result. I'm sure I could tweak their set-up to improve things, but since the 9s have the same tweeter as the 11s I didn't think that would make any significant difference on the top end. I'm happy with the 9s and glad I made the comparison. Sometimes bigger is not necessarily better!

I bit on one overpriced HDMI cable and probably overpaid for the speaker wire as well. (I allowed the small store to get a few $$ profit out of me!) But any additional cables I will buy from monoprice. I'll need a couple soon.

Took 5+ hours to tear out my old stereo that I hadn't powered-up in at least 10 years (I stopped using it when I discovered the compliance on both woofers was falling apart, now completely gone!), clean-up all around, and install all the new stuff. It all came off without a hitch. Almost midnight before I powered-up for the first time.

In a word - AWESOME !! I still have a LOT of work ahead of me to learn all the functions, and the remote is currently a hassle (non-intuitive), as pointed-out by the C/Net review. But the Sony GUI is very cool, easy to navigate. I may actually learn that remote at some point. If not, I'll "Harmonize", but that will have to wait a bit. I also have to calibrate the system, but I thought I'd wait to learn more of the features, etc. first, and I still need to settle on final locations for the center and rear speakers.

I played some CDs first, as I was doing in the store for comparison. Never heard any of them sound that great. And they sounded better than the system did in the store. I then put in Transformers for a first A/V test and was blown away; I heard many things I never heard the first 2 times! Only intended to play a bit and ended-up watching the whole thing!

On Sun. I got my old turntable working and loved it! I haven't heard anything from vinyl in quite a long time, and never in SS (even if simulated, it beats just stereo IMHO). Comparison to digital will be cool, but I have a number of records that AFAIK were never released on CD so it's great to have that capability back. Bad news on my R-R tho' - it's not working. The FF and REW drives are fine, but the 3rd motor that drives the capstan in Play isn't turning at all. Gotta tear into that one soon. I didn't try my cassette deck yet.

Last evening I played Pitch Black (for the nth time - big Vin Diesel fan!) and again heard stuff I never knew was there, and had the true SS experience for the first time with that movie. Sitting in the middle of all those "creatures" flapping about is "out of this world" !!

Lots to learn and lots to enjoy! And hopefully some time now to do it.

Tks everyone for your help and suggestions! Once again my affiliation with SatGuys cost me a huge bundle as I went from about $1,500 budgeted to almost 3 times that! And I love every penny and moment spent on/with the toys...!

Click to expand...