I asked this question in another forum, and I re-post it here to hear some comments. Thanks.
After a while watching different kinds of movie with my Z-5500, I can say that this speaker is GOOD at making loud noise like explotions, rumbling sound in movies, but I notice it is also VERY WEAK at producing soft ambience sound like background sea waves, wind breeze, leaves on the trees, soft background/distance traffic, soft footsteps, etc. These soft detailed sounds are too soft to be heard from Z-5500 (almost non-existent). In fact my TV's internal speaker can produce these ambient sounds so much clearer than Z-5500. With TV, these soft ambience sound is there to be heard clearly, but not from any Z-5500's sats, which is like a dead speaker.
With Z-5500, to hear these soft sounds, you have to turn up the volume ridicuously high to be heard quite clearly, but it will make explotion sounds doomly loud & extremely painful. In many cases, "soft" movies will tend to sound a little too quiet with Z-5500, while explosive sounds too loud. Certainly you can not enjoy both world of "explosive sound" & "soft ambient sound" well enough at normal volume listening.
From this experience, I also start to realize why most Z-5500 reviewers fail to uncover this fact. It is a little sad actually that many reviewers were focusing too much on the power of the speaker (RMS = volume) than anything else. The rave reviews are always about RMS POWER = explosive sounds....Z-5500 is 505W RMS is all they talk about. This fact has MISLED the reviews to judge the speaker from how loud the subwoofer can produce explosive sounds, rather than what it can produce in soft ambience. THIS HAS NOT BEEN REVEALED IN ANY REVIEWS SO FAR.
Now, frankly I don't know why my internal TV's speaker can produce these soft ambience much better than a $300 speaker. - Is this caused by poor decoder in Z-5500? Poor satellites? or is it even remotely possible that the problem is caused by the fact that DTS/DD5.1 has to disperse this ambient sound to 4 speakers, which further complicates the difficulties of FOCUSING this soft sound to our normal hearings.
Second thing, I don't know whether other low-priced $300-400 HTIBs from Pioneer, Samsung, LG, Onkyo, JBL, also exhibits this problem. Do all low-priced HTIBs exhibit the same problem ? If yes, then I can't blame Z-5500. I can only blame myself for being a little too fussy about sound quality.
One thing that forced me write this, is because I FAILED terribly to enjoy watching "MASTER & COMMANDER" with Z-5500. As some people might know, most of the scenes takes place on the sea & ships, where the sound of soft seawave is very dominant on the background and also lots of soft conversation, & soft detailed sound like footsteps on the ship's wooden floor, sail movement, etc. The tricky part is, in certain scenes during the movie, this quiet environment can suddenly turn 180 degrees to fully explosive with cannon firing, which is very loud & shaking the floor. It is difficult for me to watch this movie with Z-5500 because either it sounds too loud ...or too quiet. Too unbalanced.
I didn't realize how much ambient sound I missed until I turned on my internal TV's speaker, and I start hearing THOSE SOUND of soft footsteps, little things moving around, continous seawaves on the background, etc.
Try this movie, in the first 30 min, especially in the first 10 min until the first cannon firing, then you'll see what I mean about being too quiet & too loud at the same time with Z-5500.
For me, Z-5500 sounds good in explosive/high-action movies, but certainly not so good for those movies which heavily relies on the soft ambience to create a the environment.
Anybody want to comment this ?
PS: - Z-5500 connected DIRECTLY to DVD player (no computer) - Z-5500 speaker has been calibrated