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November 27, 2018 - 12:20am
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Better Sound in Living Room
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There are custom installers that will absolutely come out to your home and make selections for you. This is not necessarily the best solution as the system will likely meet aesthetic needs, not necessarily your sound needs.
Many retailers offer both take home and installation services. Pick a retailer with a robust selection or go to a few retailers to evaluate equipment. Narrow it and see if you can do an in-home demo. Things will always sound different in your room.
You need to decide a few things like do you want in-wall vs speakers in a cabinet? Where will the equipment be? How many channels do you want? What sound profile do you like? Even expensive speakers can sound radically different so it is important to figure out what you like and how you want it to look. Then you can shop. To do that, you may need to go out and listen to a broad spectrum of speakers and hardware.
Do the listening in your own home.
What you hear in a store will not be the same; different acoustics.
If you give your city or location, some people may be able to make suggestions.
You really should engage someone to help you figure it all out. Everything matters and skimping on a single component can wreck what you are trying to accomplish.
Thanks to all. Good advice. I'm in the L.A. area. Last system that I had was about 20 years ago -- quite a bit of moving since then, and no time, but now settled. What I had then was not really thought out, more a matter of what I was able to find used. I had two Magneplaner MG1 and two Gale boxes. Don't even remember what I had for power, maybe NAD, but it was decent (I think those were both 4 ohm). But I got what was a nice "spacious" sound for orchestral works. Symphony of Psalms/Shaw/Atlanta sounded wonderful. May need to buy used again. But I will take the good advice and see what I can find. Thanks.
My suggestion is to go to different store and show them the pictures or video of your room in different angle, it might be help if you can give them the dimension that would help determine the sounds from different angle but it would be difficult to find a right person for that and if you find one you may ask him to come over and check the room personally.
the best sound that you can experience will be accomplished by the speakers you choose. The rest of the stuff, amp, cdp,wires,etc. is,mostly, snake oil.As long as you get a good quality amp that can adequately drive the speakers (which pretty much any quality name brand amp will do) you can forget about all the other BS.I would listen to Martin Logan ESL and Magnaplanar speakers. This is where you want to spend your money. 99% of sound quality is accomplished by the speakers.
Have to disagree with you there.
In my experience...crap in = crap out.
Dave
crap in, crap out refers to the source recording. nothing to do with equipment.If it's a crap recording, it's crap. If a good recording, it's good. Your amp has nothing to do with it.