It amazes us here at Big Picture Big Sound that people are willing to drop $1,000, $2,000 or more on a flat-panel TV, but won't spend a dime on a sound system to go with it. Or, they'll drop a few hundred bucks on a soundbar or a one-brand "Home Theater in a Box" system that provides inferior sound. We just haven't found a company that can make a good receiver, a good Blu-ray player and good speakers. To do it right, you have to mix and match components: speakers from a speaker company, receivers from a receiver company, etc. But doing that is normally fairly expensive, right? Not now.
We've found excellent deals on three great components that you can piece together into a custom home theater system -- and it kicks packaged HTiB systems right in the proverbial ass.
First up is the Sony BDP-S590 Blu-ray 3D Player. This one component can support 3D and 2D Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs. It also has built-in WiFi and loads of streaming choices, including Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, VUDU, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and a ton of Sony-specific choices. Typically, we favor Panasonic, but the company's 2012 crop seems flakier than previous years. The Sony is a solid player, with a lot of great features.
We got to check out this player earlier this year and said, "It offers a mind-boggling amount of entertainment." Check out our Sony BDP-S590 Blu-ray 3D Player Review for details on what this player can do. Of course, you could also check out Amazon's product page for more information:
Next, you're going to want some type of hub to hook up your entire AV setup. It doesn't make sense (and sometimes it's not even possible) to hook each component directly up to your HDTV. In other words, you're going to need something like the Yamaha RX-V371BL 5.1-Channel A/V Receiver. At last peek, Amazon had this receiver on sale for $169.95 (save $80!), which is a really nice deal on this HDMI-switching 3D-compatible receiver.
The 5.1-channel receiver can crank 100 watts per channel and has 3D support with Audio Return Channel (ARC), four 1080p HDMI compatible inputs, and decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD content. It also includes a few Yamaha perks, such as CINEMA DSP 3D technology, Yamaha's Parametric Room Acoustic Optimizer (YPAO), the Compressed Music Enhancer feature, and four SCENE buttons for instant access to default settings. Find out more about this receiver on Amazon's product page:
Of course, all of the above components won't mean a thing if you have crappy speakers. Thankfully, we have found an excellent deal on the Jamo S 426 HCS 3 WENGE 5-Piece Home Theater System. This set includes a pair of super-slick, super-tall S 426 floorstanding speakers. Each one packs two 5.5-inch bass/midrange drive units in a reflex-optimized enclosure and a low resonance 1-inch tweeter mounted in a Jamo Waveguide. Rounding out the set is the S 420 CEN center channel and two of the S 420 SUR surrounds. These have the exact same Waveguide mounted tweeter as the S 426 and a 3.5-inch version of the S 426 bass/mid unit.
With the towers in the front, you could get by without a subwoofer for a bit and add one into your system later on. Just set the subwoofer to "OFF" in the Yamaha receiver's setup menu and it will re-route the LFE information to the main left and right towers. Find out more about this speaker package on Amazon's product page:
The total system cost, with all of the above discounts, is about $380. It's a killer system on a budget!
