Best "easy hook up" surround sound speakers?

Question

I am planning to by a Panasonic 50" plasma and would like to buy a set of speakers that I don't have to wire up all over the room. I was told that there are speakers sets, like the Bose 321 that give surround sound quality without having to wire up 5 speakers around a room. What can you suggest? Thanks

Answer 1

i had a bose 321 and true it does sound good but you can get the same sound for half or less then half the price. alot of people includng me buy bose crap because of the name. i just picked up a yamaha hts 5940 6.1 surround reciever for 175 bucks and gonna get the yamaha 6.1 speaker package and it will sound better then the bose. as far as wiring the back speakers i usually run em under the carpet along the baseboard so there out of the way and ur not walking on them and you save alot of money and time and have a decent sounding system. hope this helps

Answer 2

Well Yamaha and Polk both have a single, long speaker that you mount under the TV that takes the place of 5 speakers. People who have gone to demos have said it sounds fairly good.

But I suspect the demo rooms were all built to have un-broken rear and side walls for the sounds to reflect off of. If you dont have a room like this, I suspect these all-in-one speakers may not work well, but they are easy to hook up.

These bar-speakers run about $1,000. There are also some adaptors for rear speakers to make them wireless, but then you have to have an amplifier in the back to make them work, getting them to calibrate with the front speakers is a pain, etc.

Buy a spool of wire, run the wires around the baseboard, cover exposed wires with a nice throw rug, and then thank me later for all the $$$ you will save. Spend the money on real HD service from your cable co or Sat provider. (You do plan on getting HD service - right? That TV will look like crap just plugging it into the 1940's television signal coming out of your cable.)

Answer 3

Well, there are speakers like you mentioned that have a special controller to psychoacousticaly give you the sound of surround sound without having to run wire to rear speakers, but to get that true surround sound experience, you have to hookup the rears and adjust the surround sound reciever for the room parameters. I know nobody like ugly speaker wire, but if you know what your doing, you can professionally conceal the wire running it under the house and coming up inside the wall or in the attic and down the wall or ceiling depending on where your rear surround speakers are located. The Bose system is going to be proprietary meaning non-standard speakers, non-standard connectors, etc. so I try to stay away from their stuff even though our ears tell us it sounds good!

Answer 4

You can easily have rear speakers now that have no wire connections to the front speakers. They will need to have a tiny wire connected to each other, as well as access to one power point, but at least you don't have to bother with wires in front of you, getting under the house, trying to run wires in the walls etc etc. Sony and panasonic both do these types of things, and start at around 500-1500 AUS dollars.
Good luck