Advice and opinions on my first proper surround sound set up- What next to upgrade?

jonnyholywoodni

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Hi there

This is my first post, though I have been reading the forum for advice for a few years now. I have bitten by the home cinema bug and would like some advice and opinions on my set up and what to buy next but on a tight budget of up to £100.

Until recently I had been using an old Philips Home Theater in a Box that was about 10 years old. It sounded pretty bad and I had always wanted to upgrade but I don't earn much money and everything decent all looked so expensive.

After Christmas I spotted an amp nearby on gumtree and decided I would start trying to build a budget and hopefully decent system from ebay, gumtree and second hand. Since then I have picked up a few bargains and I have a basic set up.

TV: Panasonic 42" plasma
Amp: Yamaha RX-V361 - £50 off gumtree but no HDMI
Fronts: Morduant Short Mezzo 1 - £60 off ebay
Centre: Monitor Audio Vector V20 - £35 ex-display Richer Sounds
Rears: Mission Cyrus 780 -£40 off ebay
Optical cable to Sky HD box: QED performance - already owned
Optical cable to Playstation 3 (Blu-Ray): Profigold - £6 off ebay
Speaker cable: Cambridge Audio Symphony 200 - £1.99 per metre Richer Sounds

My room is a about 16' x 20' and it has a real wood floor.

At the moment I dont have a subwoofer and I have been trawling ebay and gumtree and second hand shops for ages for a good deal. The bloke who sold me the Mezzo 1 speakers also has a Morduant Short Genie 409W subwoofer that he wants me to make him an offer on it. I am very tempted and was thinking of offering around £70. Does anyone think this would be the a good idea for my next purchase? Would the fact its downwards firing onto a wooden floor mean the sound would be bad?

Other than the sub what do you think of my set up? My amp is very budget and maybe I need something more powerful as my next purchase? Does such a cheap amp mean my speakers aren't getting the juice they need to perform well? What about the centre? I added this last and i'm not totally sure its an improvement over just having the 2 x Mezzo 1s upfront and no centre. They sounded lovely on their own and I realise you are supposed to have the same make of centre as the fronts but I havent been able to source a cheap Morduant Short centre yet and I don't know if this should be my next purchase?

What about cables? It would be cheaper to upgrade these as my next purchase. Should I try to get some QED speaker cable off ebay 2nd hand or a better optical cable than my profigold one? Maybe that would be a waste if I should upgrade my amp to HDMI? I've spotted this one for example

Denon AVR-1513 - £99.95 @ RicherSounds (instore) £89.95 If you join Richer Sounds VIP Lounge, link in comments - Hot UK Deals

Any advice or help or opinions would be very welcome.

Thanks

Jonny
 
Hi.
You've already paid too much for the cables so any further purchases should be less, not more.
Tha Yamaha isn't bad and I don't see the Denon being better in any way.
Logi
 
Thanks for the post.

I take it then from your experience that you dont think cable quality makes much difference to the sound?

Do you think adding a subwoofer is the next best option?
 
I have many optical cables, none costing more than a couple of pounds, and all working perfectly.
I haven't bought speaker cable for a while, and did get good quality, but it was a lot less than £2 a metre and ought not to be that much now.
For a recent addition, I used much cheaper cable for front highs to make it a 7:1 system, and that's working as well as the quality stuff!
The bass unit would be a good idea, imho, and the wood floor would be OK for it.
 
Great thanks for the advice. The guys in Richer Sounds actually talked me out of buying even more expensive cable as they said you wont notice any big difference.

I'll try to get a subwoofer next then if I can.

Do you think an amp with hdmi is important? Also do you have any advice on how to calibrate it all. I've heard a thx dvd might have a tool on the extras.
 
RS are good, and that makes a nice change from the sort of store where they talk everyone into buying very expensive cables.
The speaker cable at £1.99 would still have been too high for me though, and EBay has adequate opticals for £1!
I doubt if you could get an amplifier without HDMI, and you certainly do need at least the three that the Denon has.
My opinions on "calibration", whether it's about amplifiers or TVs, are heretical on AVF.
You get a small range of possible settings on the amp, and you jsut try them until you get the effect that you like.
 
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While there is certainly no harm in just trying the different settings to see which one you like, you should at least attempt to set up/calibrate you amp to the best of your ability IMHO:

Even if you haven't got an autocalibrating amp, or an SPL meter. All you need is a tape measure and your ears: Measure the distances from the speakers to your seat and enter them into the amp's menu. Then put on the amp's test tones and adjust the levels so that the tones sound even speaker to speaker. You shouldn't have the surrounds noticeably louder than the fronts (much of the time they are making a subtle influence on the overall sound field). Given your mixture of speakers the test tones may sound quite different as they pan around the room, so you'll just have to use your best judgement unless you know someone with an SPL meter you can borrow (or some kind of iPhone type app perhaps?).

Likewise the sub shouldn't be thumping away all the time (unless it's an extended explosion/crash scene. Without meters/mics the best you can do is set the level by ear such that it's not immediately obvious that the sub is working...until you turn it off.

Once you've done this you can try out the various effects, but I imagine that (like most people) you'll just stick to one or two standard settings after trying the 'Hall/Concert/Stadium' type effects out briefly. ;)

Regarding actual upgrades I'd make the following points to help consider your next move (which may involve waiting a bit and saving some more money):

1. If your front three speakers don't match exactly then the soundfield won't be as good as it can be. Better to have three cheaper fully matching speakers than an odd mix of expensive/large and cheap/small. For any upgrades bare this in mind, so IMHO either look to replace the centre to match your Mordant Shorts or visa versa. Sell the unwanted leftover speaker s on the forum's classifieds. Also look on there for your next speakers too since you'll get much better value and there is little to go wrong with a speaker.

2. A forum favourite for subwoofers is the UK based direct selling 'BK Electronics'. They don't sell any subs for £100, but they do occasionally come up in the classifieds. At the moment there is a Bk Minotaur for example which would (IMHO) be considerably better than the MS sub or anything that RS would sell for £100.

It's sold now, but just as an example, there are others available maybe something in budget and local to you if you're lucky to save on delivery:

http://www.avforums.com/forums/speaker-subwoofer-classified-adverts/1755192-sale-bk-electronics-minotaur.html

Or save up for the XLS200 for a real step up in bass performance:

Sub Woofers - Sub Bass - Subwoofer

3. If you get an amp with HDMI then you will be able to use the amp to decode HD soundtracks which are a higher quality than you will be getting by using the optical connection from the PS3. However, in truth this might be more academic since the odd mixture of speakers you have may not allow you to hear the improvements. However, worth bearing in mind for later on.
 
While there is certainly no harm in just trying the different settings to see which one you like, you should at least attempt to set up/calibrate you amp to the best of your ability IMHO:
All you need is a tape measure and your ears
Surely set up and calibrate are two different things?
Everyone does setup.
That's what I meant by
"You get a small range of possible settings on the amp, and you just try them until you get the effect that you like".
It's what you mean about the tape measure and the ears.
It also applies to "effects", or "modes" as Onkyo calls them, and you soon find the ones you like and stick with them.
Our forum calibrators mean something much more elaborate than that.
 
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For me set up is part of the calibration process (we obviously disagree regarding calibration in general, especially reagarding displays, so I'll park that discussion since it doesn't help the OP). However I took your comments to mean that you didn't even do the setup either, so my apologies for making that assumption. :)

I do have an SPL meter myself (and an autocalibrating Antimode 8033 for my sub) but pretty much all of my audio set up is just done by listening to familiar tracks/scenes over and over with different crossover, etc settings until I find the one that I like best.

For example, I recently found that I prefer to use a phantom centre since due to my centre's proximity to the floor tends to sound a bit 'boxy' when listening near to reference levels. Until I can find a way to raise the centre (it's under the TV which doesn't matter when I'm using the projector of course, it could be much higher up so the speaker 'stand' will have to pivot somehow, so I'm working that one out now). For now I'm going to use this phantom mode (coupled with a lower crossover at 60Hz which gives a smooth bass response in my room) as it just sounds so much better this way.

It just shows that a bit of careful set up and lots of critical listening can improve the result. IMHO anyone with a less than ideal set up (or non matching) centre should at least try a phantom centre to see if it works better for them. The only drawback is that if you do sit off centre then the sound won't seem 'locked' to the centre of the soundstage. Lucky that 'my seat' is dead centre and my OH isn't that bothered to even notice. ;):devil:
 
It is on displays that I really depart from the forum's devotion to calibration.;)
The new Onky has plenty of settings for speaker distance and so on, and they were the first things to do.
There are a lot of "modes" and they are very much a matter of personal taste, decided on through trial and error.
My centre is immediately above the TV, and I've just added high fronts which improved things more than expected.
 
I can't put my centre above my TV since it would end up behind my (non AT) projector screen. However the current 'workaround' will keep me happy until I can sort something out for the centre bracket. Some kind of pivoting bracket I have in mind, but I'll have to build it myself (like my projector shelf) since I can't buy one ready made to do what I want. It's useful being handy with DIY sometimes. :smashin:

I'll agree to differ re display calibration since I know how much happier with the picture I am when I've properly adjusted the gamma on my projector (plus the greyscale and colour gamut), but I know some prefer to watch non calibrated displays...Thankfully neither of us are forced to watch each other's displays so no harm done. Live and let live and all that. :)
 
Thanks for the advice guys.

I haven't properly calibrated my system yet so thats something I can try to do using a movie with a good soundtrack.

I'm going to keep an eye on the ads here to see if any subs come up for cheap. I'm in northern ireland so we dont get much nearby on gumtree or ebay.

Has anyone experience of using the THX calibration tool on dvd or blu-ray?
 
I know how much happier with the picture I am when I've properly adjusted the gamma on my projector (plus the greyscale and colour gamut)
I've only had a basic PJ that didn't have many adjustments, but accept that a proper one would have them and benefit from using them.:)
 
In terms of sound I'm not so sure, but for video there is a free downloadable disc: Burn to a standard DVD blank, but it plays in HD just as if it were a BluRay (magic I know, but it does work ;)). Just use the basic patterns to set brightness and contrast, plus read up on the AVforum's review of your display (if applicable) just to see if there are recommended modes to use.

Link for the disc download:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/948496/avs-hd-709-blu-ray-mp4-calibration

Otherwise it's well worth looking out for an SPL meter so you can properly balance the speaker levels, then just play your favourite scenes/songs to tweak sub level and try out different crossover settings. If it doesn't sound any different to you when you change settings, then it doesn't really matter anyway.

Going back to your OP, I really think it's more critical that you consider trying to sort your non matching front speakers since this is likely to be limiting your system IMHO.

I've only had a basic PJ that didn't have many adjustments, but accept that a proper one would have them and benefit from using them.:)

I'm slightly cheating since I use a Lumagen Video Processor which has far more adjustment points than any TV/projector (125 for colour gamut and 21 for greyscale/gamma). I can then compare the original display only setting with the fully corrected setting in a split second by the press of a button. However, I've shown some friends and they look at me as if to ask what am I on about (should have gone to specsavers I reckon :D) so my 'massive difference' is their 'meh'. Keeps me happy though, which is what counts. :smashin:
 
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Quite right, especially when combined with "Use your own eyes and ears to chose your AV equipment".:clap:
 

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