audio is just as important as visuals don't believe me well here's some 480p
footage with great audio and here is some crisp 4K with bad
audio that is why so many of you invest in upgrading your TV speakers but here's
the thing thousands of you every month are doing it wrong when we looked at the
Bose TV speaker a couple of years ago we concluded that it was okay but also that
if you have this kind of money to spend you can do much better how much better
how about a dedicated AV receiver how about six Channel Dolby audio how about
all of that for less than the price of one of these don't believe me just watch
Step One is to rip out my bougie sound
system step two plug in the Bose TV speaker for a before test I'm Still A
Part
the just like this sound
fine not a lot of Base but what do you expect it's fine yep step three is to
hit up the local Facebook marketplace where we found a total of three
solutions that we think have a solid crack at beating our bows and look at
this we also found this segue to our sponsor flexis spot their Black Friday
sale is on right now and you can take an additional $50 off their E7 plus
standing desk and their C7 series of Ergo chairs just by using using our
links and coupon code in the video description Marketplace solution number
one is the Sony htsf 2300 it may be a
lowly home theater in a box kit But it
includes a dedicated only semi- proprietary receiver that's going to
unlock a lot of options for us these non-standard speaker connectors will be
a minor thorn in our side later as will the HDMI 1.2 connector when we need to
grab a separate remote in order to change TV inputs or adjust volume but
for the quality I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it compared to our TV
speaker we'll be hooking this up using the same Optical link that we used for
the Bose TV speaker originally we had hoped to find a receiver that would
handle video switching for us as well but it turns out that even the worst
ones that will handle 4K would have immediately blown our budget man toss
link was so cool the data rate started low and stayed low so it can only do 5.1
but it's not susceptible to any kind of interference which is uh pretty cool now
comes the part where we actually set everything up ah yes how not tedious
thankfully he included the cables for those proprietary Clips nice you might
have noticed by the way that we cheated and totally did not take my gear out of
here yeah that's where we're ending that
we're needing to get a little bit creative about uh speaker positioning
here but that's one of the drawbacks of a setup like this by the way this kit
originally came out in July of 2007 and was around $500 back then or 750
adjusting for inflation thankfully we only paid 40 Canadian rubles for this
wow that's a great value I have High Hopes I mean it even includes the stands
oh and their height adjustable that's pretty
cool yeah a convenient thing about these kits is they typically come with all the
cables you need though I suspect in this case you'll probably want to cut it a
little short like how far back are they expecting you to put this thing um but
one thing that was missing from our kit even though it came with it originally
is a calibration microphone the good news is it should work with any
omnidirectional mic so we brought one from the office to give it a test
oh yeah that's not good okay we might
have to just manually measure everything okay we'll give that a try I thought I'd
try cool yeah did you put batteries in the remote no sir oh wow these expire in
2014 they aged like fine battery
wine obviously we could have spent a little bit more time on cable management
but in terms of just getting everything connected and powering the thing on that
was only about 5
minutes I can already immediately notice
the room being more full than the bow Soundbar well like I mean there's only
so much that you can do with computational bouncy nonsense having
dedicated speakers especially if you're going for an old or a more basic setup
that is not going to be as modern there's just no substitute for it yeah
this is immediately more immersive what I didn't expect it that that easy 40
bucks yeah um now I do think that there's
probably some things we could tune whoever was using this before had their
subwoofer at minus5 their surrounds at plus five uh so I think they just really
wanted to hear a lot of surround so I just need to find a factory reset
clearing it takes about 30 seconds to clear it
cleared that was a very fast 30 seconds yep that's what she
said you're rolling now I hear that twice little bit of manual setup in
terms of making sure it's configured to the right setting but all right should
we try listening again yes okay we should probably set the distances for
the speakers though remember we factory reset it we
need a measuring tape
okay oh dude is this tape measure not long enough oh I think I broke it no I'm
good I'll be right back it's only a 6ft tape measure cuz he's only 5'2 it
doesn't
matter oh look at that 10t 8 in I think this bad boy is configured
okay you ready let's watch a movie I'm actually very ready I'm I'm kind of
excited wow dude it crushes for $40 it
destroys it it this is
what5 the price yeah well it's 40
Canadian right so that's crazy that's like $30
us it's not amazing no the base in
particular kind of lacking but what it
is is is amazing for the price yeah at a
fraction of the cost of the Bose it is multiple times better in every possible
way and we haven't even touched on one of the biggest advantages that's
modularity while our ancient Optical Connection prevents us from hooking up
additional surrounds a second sub or height channels the jump from stereo or
an inexpensive Soundbar to a dedicated 5.1 setup is way more noticeable than
the jump from 5.1 to say
7.1 and coming back to modularity
nothing prevents us from taking those few channels that we do support and
swapping out our speakers for something better that is as long as everything is
rated for the same impedance more on that later first let's give it a try by
swapping out our left and right channels for these Phillips FWB MC 50s just a
quick snip job a little
strip a little twist making sure to match up the black striped cable with
our black cable and finish it off with whatever Fastener suits your purposes
yes I know morett suck I don't care it's fine for what we're doing once again
we'd obviously do this a little differently in a final install but the
point is just to evaluate the sound quality and we're not accounting for
these stands in our budget cuz we could easily wallmount these we actually got a pretty good deal
on these considering some eBay listings list them for triple the price what' we
pay 40 Canadian just for these speakers okay so now we're at 80 bucks let's see
if they improve our experience a
lot those sound a lot better yeah they do that is almost a bad thing in this
case because it really draws your attention to how bad that Center channel
is yeah the clarity we're still missing
the base boom of a proper powered subwoofer but the clarity is a night and
day difference and just having that little wimpy thing mixed into it is like
like I don't know it's like having someone talking over the person you're
trying to have a conversation with again modularity you could swap it out though
and you'll probably want to check this out
guys I didn't think it'd be this
obvious but like even through my lab mic
over YouTube I bet you guys can hear the difference between those two and if you
can't well hey just stick with the stock speakers and be happy with better
surround speaking of before we change out any speakers we want to upgrade Our
receiver to give ourselves better amplification for you know future
proofing we'll talk about the exact one we chose in a minute but first there's
two major things you want to watch out for when you're shopping for a receiver
one is the Io if you're looking for video switching you need to ensure that
at least the output of the receiver supports the minimum revision of HDMI
that can handle the resolution and the refresh rate that your TV is operating
at number two is going to be the impedance rating if your speakers are
higher than what your receiver can do you might not get the full volume or
range whereas if they're too low your devices could overheat and even burn out
there is some wiggle room though as you're about to see have a look at this
our St Str DA 1000ss has a little switch
to go between 4 and 8 ohms our speakers
are rated for six so according to this little label that's handly silk screened
right on the back we just need to switch it to 4 Ohms and we should be good to go
just from looking at the back you can tell this is a much higher end product
with way more available inputs however you can see that um HDMI is
conspicuously absent so unless you're planning to hook your PS1 up to it
you're not going to be using the video switching capabilities even the audio
hookups are almost all stereo so they'd only be useful for like a CD
changer so we're going to be stuck with 5.1 over Optical but we're still going
to have a much more po potent amplifier oh don't don't put this in the video she
cut my morrettes off do not put this in the video people already hate me on the
audio side though things are a little more interesting in addition to the
digital input which is what we'll be using just like with this receiver it
has a full 5.1 analog input which theoretically would allow us to use a
third-party decoder box to support more modern formats though we still wouldn't
be getting height channels or secondary subwoofers or anything like that because
those analog inputs are only 5.1 even though on the output side there appears
to be support for more channels so we're just going to use it as a better 5.1
amplifier now we're just about ready to try this thing out but we realized
something our kit subwoofer doesn't use a standard connector this is a bit of a
spoiler for later we did buy one more kit that had this chuner of a sub we're
just going to use it now okay perfect let's do it I can tell just from the
weight that this is going to be one heck of an upgrade wait are we still using
this for our Center channel right okay we'll upgrade that later oh Bud butd
easy don't even don't even worry about
it it's a Wii sensor bar it's worth
noting by the way that if your TV for whatever reason doesn't support Optical
out you can also get these little Arc to Optical adapters for about 20 bucks
allowing you to use an older receiver like this with a more modern HDMI ARC
setup took us a little while to figure out the interface here but we've got our
speaker setup config figured H okay 5.1
and then we've got all of our distances dialed in and the sub is not on oh the
sub's working the sub's working the price we've paid at this
point is a little bit complicated because we're using the center channel
and rear channels from our original $40 setup we're using our $85 amp is that
all we paid for that yeah sick and then we borrowed the subwoofer from the
$200 3.1 setup that we bought so
and we're using the $40 Phillips as well we're at maybe a couple hundred bucks
yeah and again that's Canadian I'm still a part of
the this sound quality is fine totally
fine like dude the better amp it helps
freaking slap yeah I wasn't expecting it
to make that big of a difference with such basic speakers especially our
Center Channel but I mean part of what
you're going to get from a better amp is cleaner output and this is a very
musical section of this song so we're really taking advantage of the left and right
channel I can see how people get addicted to this yeah the constant like
need to add the next speaker or the next
receiver or Center channel right tweak the next thing okay and we haven't even
turned this up yet
all I need is change all that Center channel is Garbo
so it's time to jump ahead and
uh get a new center channel in here shall we question for you as we're
hooking this up these were part of another home theater in a box right I
couldn't quite tell cuz all of these model numbers on these Sony's are
slightly different I think the three speakers we got were part of a kit the
receiver that this seller was selling was part of a different kit and I don't
believe this sub was part of that kit either no it wasn't for sure so I think
whoever we bought it from also was doing a mix Mash of everything cool
dude you versus the guy she tells you not to worry about exactly dude I am
excited to see how this goes we're swapping those Philips bookshelves into
our rear channels and then we're using our new front channels which as you can
see are a little
stronger what really blows my mind is
that we have by no means dialed this in
properly if I gave myself an afternoon
to play around with it and fine-tune
it we went at the same price from yeah
yeah it's better than the TV speakers but
to good enough like I would never walk
into someone's living room or theater room or whatever listen to these
speakers and go yeah but they could be better yeah oh yeah they're good enough
yeah our total price was 325 Canadian or
about 240 us so we were actually under
the Bose TV speaker mean for our endgame setup for our endgame setup that we have
right now we had enough left over that we could buy a DVD to watch on
it or hear me out maybe we put that toward a universal remote or something
even with those inconveniences we basically crushed the competition
everything from dialogue Clarity to music quality to maximum volume to
immersion is clearly better than our
Soundbar so why are sound bars so
popular well if you were watching this going gee that looked pretty
inconvenient you're not wrong there's all the cabling for starters and even
more so the effort of tracking down the right products that are going to operate
together and the right deal because our answer it's not necessarily going to be
the same as yours the odds that you guys find the exact speakers and receiver
that we use today are slim to none but
with that said I think it's safe to say that if you're looking for a more
immersive experience spending a little bit of time Googling model numbers
looking over user manuals and maybe even giving them a quick listen before you
buy could give you way better bang for your buck and even save you hundreds of
dollars compared to buying a brand new setup what you won't have to spend
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in the video description if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out
the original home theater video we did almost 2 years ago it was one of my
dreams to have this place set up and those first impressions did not
disappoint