anyone have any experience with those ‘sound bars’ ?
Its time to replace my aging 20 year old floor speakers - the wife insists on something smaller.
We’re not trying to get the deafening theatre experience - just good quality sound.
You are correct - the listed power input is 20-200 watts
From what I read in the description and my own experience bi-amping two Polk floor standing speakers, you simply hook up each left and right channel outputs for each speaker to any of the two output channels on the receiver (it doesn’t matter whether you use front or rear outputs as they are all rated for the same output loads and power). If there was a difference in the power outputs then the prudent thing would be to hook the bass end of the speakers to the higher power rated outputs.
I was only try to state that if he was proposing to hook a turntable with standard phono-out signal he would need an amp to convert the phono-out signal (high impedance low voltage if I remember correctly) to a standard line-in signal using a phono pre-amp stage as the Marantz does not have a built-in phono preamp stage.
I say we braid some of their speaker wire into a noose and give 'em a luxurious lynching. 
Think they’d feel special since the cable is so expensive?:dubious:
Well, that and fleecing some audiophool (nice term!) out of a few extra bucks.:eek:
–G!
[We’re on the same page, JZ]
[QUOTE=Waterman]
There is also no Bluetooth input so you will need to rely on your TV and/or DVD player.
[/qUOTE]
I must be stuck in the 90s as I don’t even know why you’d want a Bluetooth “input” on an AV receiver.
My Bluray player and AppleTV take care of all the streaming I ever care to do, and my Harmony remote does involve Bluetooth, but AFAIK, just from the hand-held remote to the base station that sits on my home network so it can talk to phones/tablets with the Harmony app.
FWIW, both the Harmony remote system and the AppleTV cost about $100, and are probably much better investments than a proprietary adapter as they’ll work with pretty much anything. In my experience, those receiver-specific things can also be hard to find.
OK, reporting back.
It’s the middle of the semester, and i’ve had a bunch of essays and exams to grade over the past few weeks, so all my lovely new equipment has just been sitting unopened in its boxes. But yesterday i finally got it together and set it all up.
Just after we had the conversation about the advisability of a center channel, the Polk center that goes with my speakers went on sale at NewEgg, so i snapped it up. That means i now have a three-speaker system set up with my Marantz receiver.
Setting everything up was pretty straightforward. I used banana plugs in the back of the receiver, and just the bare wire in the back of the speakers. After getting all the components hooked up, i fired up the receiver and went through the setup process, using the Audyssey microphone to calibrate speaker output. Then it was time to test it out.
Based on the small range of stuff that i listened to last night, i don’t have a single regret. While it’s a relatively cheap system that would probably be scoffed at by real audiophiles, it is light years ahead of what we had, the quality (to my amateur ears) is fantastic, and it’s more than loud enough to make us unpopular with the neighbors if we don’t keep an eye on the volume.
My wife was a bit ambivalent about all of this, especially while i was setting it up, and the living room looked like a disaster area, with boxes and styrofoam packaging and plastic bags and pieces of speaker-wire sheath all over the place. She’s converted now, though.
The first thing i did when the system was ready was to pop a copy of *Gravity *in the bluray player. *Gravity *is about her favorite movie of all time, as i documented in this thread, which i started just after she saw it for the eighth time in the theater. She eventually went a total of 13 times!
Anyway, Gravity is a very immersive experience, and one of the things she loved about seeing it in the theater was the sound. While my little home system can’t reproduce what a massive movie theater setup can do, she was very impressed with the sound it produced. Not only was the whole sound experience far bigger and better than with the TV, but she was really amazed at how many little sounds she could hear that had not been audible at all when using the TV speakers.
And you folks were definitely right about the center channel. When the receiver is set to “Movie,” it directs much of the dialog through the center, and there’s none of the imbalance between dialog and other sounds that we’ve so often had trouble with in the past.
I’ll give it a couple of weeks to get used to the new system, and then i’ll start thinking about whether i want to add a sub. Some reviews suggest that the speakers take a few weeks of use to give their best sound anyway, although i don’t know if this is actually true, or another unscientific urban legend.
Anyway, just wanted to thank everyone for their input. I’m a happy camper right now. I’ll report back if i have any other news, or more questions.
Ha ha, very funny 
Great to hear, mhendo! I wouldn’t worry about the scoffing too much as anyone who would do so is an asshat anyway. If you keep your eyes out on Kijiji or forums like AVS you can pick up a sub from someone upgrading for next to nothing, and you are right about the speakers breaking in; with regular use over a few months they will “loosen up” and become more responsive. Ironically, you probably won’t hear much difference because you’ll be using them all the time , though. 
Keep us in the loop!