I will be moving in a few months, and will have to purchase a surround system for my new home, as I can't take the one I have with me - it was a part of a "package deal" when I bought the house, and has in-wall speakers, and a built-in "home entertainment center" that I'd only destroy if I were to remove its comonents.

I have a "serious" audio system in my den which I enjoy tremendously for listening to all kinds of music, especialy classical. The surround sound system consists of a second-from-the-bottom-of-the-line JVC receiver, 5 Niles in-wall speakers, a Celestion 8" powered sub, a JVC cheapie DVD player, and a JVC 36" tube TV. Four and a half years ago, $1,800 for the whole system, installed, was too good a deal to pass up. I'm still all but blown away at how good movies sound on this system, but have never been especially impressed when merely playing music, or attempting to listen to FM, as the tuner section of the receiver is pretty lousy.

Just recently, the sub crapped out again, so I decided to replace it. I didn't want to spend much, as I'm going to have to leave it, and I found a Yamaha 10' powered sub (model YST-SW216) for only $99.95 at an outfit called "Ultimate Electronics," one of the few, dedicated electronics chains still left that has salespeople who actually know something about the products they sell. Surprisingly, their price was fully $30 less than that of Best Buy for an "open boxed" unit which I had purchased first, and then promptly returned. And the help from the salesman at Best Buy was about as useless as if I had asked the urinal in the men's room for advice.

The performance of this Yamaha sub is remarkable! It goes much, much deeper than the Celestion unit did, and the overall sound is far more impressive. The JVC receiver has a "small-large" selector for the five other speakers, so that on "small," bass is cut off at around 100HZ, and everything from there on down is fed to the sub, allowing for the user to play the system a good deal louder without distortion.

A good sub sure makes a difference in a system! That which I have in my "serious" system is a $1,000 Definitive Technology unit that blends in wonderfully with my Dahlquist DQ-10's and provides a superb overall sound, with that chest-pounding deep bass from organ pedal notes, bass drums and synthesizers. This 10" cheapie does wonders for the surround system, and a recent re-playing of portions of "X-Men: The Last Stand" with its thundering sound effects was quite impressive indeed, especially so considering the overall level of quality of the entire system.

So, what's my point with all this? Well, it's just that without a decent subwoofer (even a $100 Yamaha "cheapie"), it's hard to really enjoy good sound, and with one, the overall sound is so greatly improved, it's all but hard to believe that such an improvement in the complete sound of a system can be oftained simply by the addition of a good subwoofer. Also, if someone's looking to add a sub to a fairly small system, then this Yamaha unit is certainly one I'd recommend. An absolute steal at only $100!