New to home cinema

darrylquigley

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Hello all,

Ive been reading posts on here for the last week and it has given me the home cinema bug!

At present I have a very basic 5.1 phillips all in one home cinema system which was about £160 around five years ago. Im looking to start a seperates system but I dont know too much about it.

Would anyone be able to advise me on a good set-up to get me started? I have a budget of around £400-450.

Thanks for your help

Darryl
 
The first thing is to set out a budget. For the £400-450 you mentioned below, is this for both speakers and an amp? Or were you perhaps thinking of using your old speakers until you can upgrade them later?

The next thing is to list all the pieces of external equipment you have to connect so you know that whatever you buy will have enough inputs. Also make sure you consider any forseeable changes to your system in the near future (i.e will you be upgrading a DVD player to Blu-Ray etc).
 
I agree that you first need to define what your budget is to include.

If replacing an All-In-One systen then I'd suggest that you need to budget for the following as a minimum:

  • Amplifier
  • Speakers
  • DVD or Blu-Ray Player
  • 2x HDMI cables (Player to Amp and Amp to TV)
  • Speaker Cable (often not provided with the speakers)
You may need more than this in terms of cables depending on what you are connecting up and what you already have.

As for Budgets :

a decent amp can be had for £200 - £300. The Sony STRDG820 also gets good comments from people at £229 SONY STRDG820-BLK at Richer Sounds - HI-FI Separates, Home Cinema, Speakers, MP3 DVD Portables, Plasma LCD, etc..

Speakers - the Jamo A102 are popular and can be had at about £200 if you can find them.

So thats your £450 spent.

A couple of HDMI cables can be had for £10 Gold HDMI Cables - Cable Mountain

Maplins do some decent speaker wire for £1 per m - Loudspeaker Cable 20m Drums > Maplin

Call it £480 so far.

Plus a DVD or Blu Ray player - anything from £10 for a supermarket DVD to £200 or so for a decent stand alone player.

All in - just less than £500 for a DVD system and just under £700 for a Blu-Ray system that will be mightily impressive.
 
Thanks for the replies,

My budget would be used for an amp, speakers, sub and wires.

I would be conecting a dvd player via a hdmi cable that I already have, A ps3 with a cable that comes from the av out section and splits into about four plugs that goes into the rear of my tv and sky hd which connects via a hdmi cable.

Thanks
 

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