I'm 19 years old and after living at school for the first year I have decided to commute for the remainder of my time. I am moving my bedroom into an unused room in the basement, and while doing that would like to build a complete A/V setup - 6.1 or 7.1 speaker setup with receiver in addition to a TV. I would like to budget about $2000 for the entire project. My head is still spinning after doing about 5-6 hours of research about building a home theatre setup, so I decided to post and hope that someone here could help.
Here's what I was thinking - $500 for speakers/wires, $500 for receiver, $800 for TV, with the rest to be used on smaller accessories or a slightly larger purchase in each of those catagories. Being young I do not have as trained of an ear as many of you, and would more or less be looking for power over precision. I listen to mainly hard rock and most of the movies that would take advantage of the surround sound setup would be Action/Adventure. For speakers, I was thinking JBL SCS 300.7, which go for about $450-$500 and are rated at 100w/ch. I was thinking about matching them to a Denon 1905 receiver, which goes for $500 or so.
My main questions are: Is this setup going to be the best for my needs for the ~$1000 range? Will aftermarket speaker wires make a difference in this model? Also, what can I do to improve acoustics in the room? Are there baffles or soundproofing available that is cost effective while providing a noticeable difference?
Any help is appreciated for any of these questions or for my component choices.
Well if you have a $1000 budget for receiver and speakers, I suggest you get a cheap receiver like an Onkyo 501/502 ($200 maybe?), some nice sub like a Velodyne CHT-10 ($200) and the rest $600 for three pairs of identical magnetically shielded bookshelf speakers. PSB Alpha B or Monitor Audio Bronze B1 would be good choices. Speaker wires can be normal no-name copper wires.
Improving acoustics is usually the first thing you should do when building a HT system. You can easily build diffusers yourself and put bookshelfs, chairs, carpets etc all over the room. A $100 investment to acoustics will make a bigger difference than a receiver or speakers $100 more expensive.