Mr Peabody
02-27-2010, 08:09 PM
A friend of mine has a Sony HTIB and has been wanting to upgrade but not much money. Some one posted a link here to Vann's who had some Jamo HT speaker packages on sale I shared with him. He ended up buying the 406 package for $249.00. I gave him an old Infinity sub. I took it over and brought my SPL meter to help him set everything up. The package consisted of two floor speakers, two rear and a center. A pretty nice set up for $249.00 which was supposed discounted from MSRP of $450.00. It was hard to tell right off how good the Jamo were because the Sony had built in crossovers that pulled the bass out. I guess it was set to optimize the small satelites and passive bass module that came with it originally.
The center was small enough to sit in front of his plasma without obstructing any view which put it about in line with the floorstanding speakers of the package. His wife didn't want the rears on the wall so the compromise was putting them on tables that sat at either end of the sofa. Although close not so bad since the tables brought the rears high enough to shoot over the sofa's side. I have his video going directly to HDTV, the Sony BDP audio is going to a coaxial input and satelite via optical, to the Sony receiver. His room was open at both ends. The sub was in a small corner beside one of the mains. I found turning the sub to fire parallel to the back wall to work best. Once the levels were all set we dropped in Transformers 2 to see how it all sounded. The subs crossover was all the way up to take it out of the way of the receiver's internal crossover and the volume was barely up. I have to say I was impressed with what I had done with this set up. The sub did not boom and you couldn't tell where it was by sound. The steering of effects was much better than I expected from this HTIB receiver. The Jamo did very well for what they were. I have to say I have heard more expensive systems that didn't sound as good as this set up. Other than maybe the Infinity sub this is all pretty much a budget system. And it sounded way better than I thought it would. The room is far from a perfect placement. I can only attribute the great performance to a good set up, consisting of these attributes:
1. Voice matched speakers
2. The speakers all being about the same height which is near ear level when sitting.
3. All speakers and sub having matched volume levels with a SPL meter.
4. No crossover overlap.
5. back to #3, keeping sub level matched. (Am I wrong for wishing I had took the volume knob off the sub home with me :) ) I have come to realize with my own system how important a quality sub is but it's more important to learn not to misuse a sub.
It was funny, I was sitting there in amazement at what this system was doing and my friend really didn't realize how good his system sounded. He was used to that little Sony bass module booming sound. He wants to get a HT receiver next. I just hope the receiver will sound this good when set up. I don't want to sound like it was all me, I just think I got lucky with everything having synergy and working with the points mentioned above. I think he was starting to come around after watching a bit of the movie and him realizing he was hearing effects he hadn't noticed before.
So what have we learned? You can optimize what ever you have with a proper set up and even Peabody isn't above getting his hands dirty with some budget gear upon occasion :)
The center was small enough to sit in front of his plasma without obstructing any view which put it about in line with the floorstanding speakers of the package. His wife didn't want the rears on the wall so the compromise was putting them on tables that sat at either end of the sofa. Although close not so bad since the tables brought the rears high enough to shoot over the sofa's side. I have his video going directly to HDTV, the Sony BDP audio is going to a coaxial input and satelite via optical, to the Sony receiver. His room was open at both ends. The sub was in a small corner beside one of the mains. I found turning the sub to fire parallel to the back wall to work best. Once the levels were all set we dropped in Transformers 2 to see how it all sounded. The subs crossover was all the way up to take it out of the way of the receiver's internal crossover and the volume was barely up. I have to say I was impressed with what I had done with this set up. The sub did not boom and you couldn't tell where it was by sound. The steering of effects was much better than I expected from this HTIB receiver. The Jamo did very well for what they were. I have to say I have heard more expensive systems that didn't sound as good as this set up. Other than maybe the Infinity sub this is all pretty much a budget system. And it sounded way better than I thought it would. The room is far from a perfect placement. I can only attribute the great performance to a good set up, consisting of these attributes:
1. Voice matched speakers
2. The speakers all being about the same height which is near ear level when sitting.
3. All speakers and sub having matched volume levels with a SPL meter.
4. No crossover overlap.
5. back to #3, keeping sub level matched. (Am I wrong for wishing I had took the volume knob off the sub home with me :) ) I have come to realize with my own system how important a quality sub is but it's more important to learn not to misuse a sub.
It was funny, I was sitting there in amazement at what this system was doing and my friend really didn't realize how good his system sounded. He was used to that little Sony bass module booming sound. He wants to get a HT receiver next. I just hope the receiver will sound this good when set up. I don't want to sound like it was all me, I just think I got lucky with everything having synergy and working with the points mentioned above. I think he was starting to come around after watching a bit of the movie and him realizing he was hearing effects he hadn't noticed before.
So what have we learned? You can optimize what ever you have with a proper set up and even Peabody isn't above getting his hands dirty with some budget gear upon occasion :)