I’m thinking of getting a theater system. I’d prefer one of those prepackaged deals where the DVD player comes with teh receiver and speakers since we want another player anyway. I notice quite a bit price difference based on the wattage, some are 250 watts, some 500, some higher.
My question is, can you really tell the difference for what I"d use it for? I don’t have a huge screen and don’t plan on cranking it up full blast.
My hunch is to get a 500 but if I can’t really tell then I’d go for the 250.
You’re smart to go for a kit. You can’t beat the price. The quality of equipment and sound, IMHO, is perfectly adequate for all but the biggest room or the most finicky listener.
Sound quality depends on a zillion factors, not just total amplifier output. (The true audiophiles will be here in a moment to discuss this in detail. I hope you have a pillow.) You may find that a system with a less powerful amp may sound better in your house than one with more juice.
I just bought a Pioneer home theatre system two weeks ago. It’s eactly like this one except it had this DVD player included. Dolby Digital 6.1 and DTS ES (adds a rear center speaker - tres cool), 100W per channel. It’s great. Total price at Costco: $500!
My advice would be to forget about total wattage. Get one from a known manufacturer with the features and components you want. Set it up at home and watch a good, challenging DVD. I used “The Fifth Element”. If you don’t like it, send it back and try another.
To get a perceived doubling in the loudness of volume requires approximately 10 times the wattage. Doubling won’t do squat, basically.
All that said, manufacturers claims of “250” or “500” watts needs to be taken with a grain of salt as well. Lots of snake oil has crept back into power ratings, along with grade inflation, we have to put up with power ratings inflation as well I guess.
Buy the best quality you can afford, generally speaking you want an amplifier rated twice your speakers power input. Speakers are most often damaged by underpowered amplifiers.
I also recommend the kits. I have a Kennwood reciever/speaker kit that I got a couple of years ago that is working great for me. The speakers are ussually the weakest component in a kit, but unless you are an audiophile, it wont really matter. Like Kamandi said, buy features you want not watts. Its gonna be loud enough. Unless you plan on shaking your walls but you say your not. Mine is 125 watts (RMS) for the 5 main channels and the subwoofer is a self powered 150 (I’m thinking these numbers are right but they are from memory). Boxes and advertisements will list really large wattage numbers. Sometimes they are the COMBINED watts of all the speakers or sometimes they are the PEAK watts the amp/reciever can make. Neither or those numbers are really usefull in comparing equipment. Look at the RMS number for each channel. As always http://www.crutchfield.com is a good place to do research.
dead0man
My advice is this: unless you want to share the sound with your neighbors or you have an auditorium in your home, you will rarely want more than 50 watts output per channel. Look at signal to noise ratio, you want quiet components (ones that don’t add their own electronic noise to the signal as it passes through them).
Go to a stereo store and listen to a few stereos with power meters on the amps. Turn them up til their peak output is about 100 watts. Do you want to listen to something that loud?
Total wattage is far less important than how the system sounds in your particular listening environment. Each system sounds different and your job is to identify the best one for your targeted price. I usually audition several systems over a few weeks prior to purchase. The key is to do business with a vendor that will let you audition equipment for a few days (you pay with the credit card) and then return it no questions asked. It is best to test two or more systems against eachother (blindly, if at all possible). Invite some friends over and make it a party. Since you will be living with the gear, it is certainly worth the investment of time and logistics.
In addition to sound, other key factors to be examined are usability (how user friendly is the design and graphics and buttons etc.), compatibility with your existing media (CDs, CDRs, MP3s etc), and how the image looks on your screen. Lots of variation out there.
All the Sony receivers we have that are 100x5 watts do not get as good of a sound as many of our 400 watt systems.
Two things about HTIB (Home Theater in a Box):
Component Systems: These are the ones with separate DVD player/Receiver units. I’d recommend this as the way to go, as you have more power available, and you can upgrade the DVD player if you want/have to. Downside: Space consuming.
Integrated Systems: These are the ones with the DVD player and Receiver integrated into one unit. These are ideal for smaller rooms, since the receiver tends to have much less power. However, you can find some really good ones with 400 watts (Like a Pioneer model Best Buy carries). Downsides: Less power, DVD not upgradeable, if one part breaks, the whole thing is broken. However, much more campact (and stylish). Also, most often are less expensive.
Another recommendation for HTiB with separate DVD player.
I have the Kenwood HTB-504 (now replaced with the 544, I believe), and it made the whole process of going to home theater very simple for me, a true novice in the world of electronics. You have good upgradeability, but more importantly, until you upgrade you have a good system no one’s going to snicker at.
Power is one thing, and if you really want the theater experience, you’ll need decent power. IF you are looking at HTiB, don’t go under 70 watts per channel for the 5 speakers, or under 100 watts for the subwoffer (all figures MHO). The other thing that you want to watch is the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). The lower the number the better. Most HTiB’s have a THD of about .7 or .8%.
When I took the plunge I did a lot of research. I was prepared to buy seperate components and spend up to $2000, but I figured that kind of money should wait until I live in a house not an apartment. The unit that I ended up buying was the JBL CinemaPro Pack 600. It has 100 watts per channel and a THD of .07% (that is close to what high end Marantz amps put out). The system came with a 5 disc DVD changer and the tuner. It has Dolby Digital (a must for home theater), DTS (also a must) and can decode MP3’s (important for many people). I should point out that the MSRP was $1200 but the JBL website is selling factory refurbished ones for under $600. A steal at that price.
Also, l would recommend doing some research and then going out to stores to listen to various set ups.
If you’ve settled on the simplicity and low cost of a Home-Theater-In-A-Box (HTIB), I wouldn’t worry about the power rating at all. In this segment of the market, I’d shop by speaker quality, price, and features, not by amp power. I’ve got a couple of reasons:
HTIB systems usually come with a set of, shall we say, modest speakers. Amp power isn’t likely to be a factor in determining the ultimate performance of a system like this.
The value of high power output is generally overstated in the audio hobbyist field, IMHO. Given some speakers, a room, and program material, there is some power level that is required for clean sound at a given volume level. Having more power than that available won’t make the sound better, but it will let you play slightly louder. I bet most of the HTIB systems are plenty loud enough.
At the price levels you’re dealing with, the power output specs on the amps are pretty much fantasy anyway, and fair apples-to-apples comparision shopping (as far as amp power goes, at least) is going to be very difficult. The makers/marketers can play games with the test conditions to inflate the advertized figures dramatically. They can change the number of channels driven, the frequency range, and the distortion level, for a start. An amp that an audio enthusiast would consider to be a clean, honest 30 or 40 watts may be sold as 100 watts in this market segment. And I do say “may be” because not all the manufacturers do that stuff, so you can’t even just figure they’re all cheating you equally.
All in all, I think you’d be happier if you spend the energy worrying about which DVDs to rent rather than which HTIB system to buy.
Sure there is, it’s just that the RMS Power always = ZERO. Not too impressive if you’ve just bought a 10 grand amp. Seriously, in this case RMS is just a modifier that describes the method by which the power is determined. RMS voltage squared divided by the impedance or some such EE geek speak.
The secret to true home theater sound is in the connections and what type of place you live in. If you need to be quiet, 50 watts is fine, if you can crank the volume, then 100 watts and above is good. As far as I’m concerned all you need to worry about the receiver is if it has an optical input. Optical inputs will allow you to send a pure digital signal from the DVD to the receiver, and trust me its far better then those lil RCA connects. Next make sure you go buy some Monster speaker cable to connect the speakers to the receiver, because it makes a hell of a difference (they dont lose as much signal and have a bigger frequency range which equals better sound).
So to recap…
100 watts or more will be plenty of juice, money permitting and neighbor permitting. Make sure the receiver (and you dvd player) have optical connections.
Get Monster cable for your speaker cable.
Keep in mind that speaker placement is vital. Better receivers will allow you to ‘calibrate’ the receiver to the room, basically allowing you to adjust each speaker’s distance from the central sitting point, and to adjust the volume of each speaker independently. A good rule of thumb is to buy the most expensive one you can afford.
Speaking as a real-live home theater professional, World Eater’s right. I’d go with 100W per channel if your amp is decent because some reserve is nice, but ultimate sound quality and the power you need depend on the room, how you are going to use the system, the room, your relationship with your neighbors and your wife*, the room, speaker and furniture placement, the room, and any of myriad other variables. Especially the room. Most home theaters are set up in rooms that existed years or decades before the idea of home theaters. Size, shape, surfaces, and materials are often very much wrong. Furniture and its placement are often for reasons other than the optimal theater experience. The compromises are enough to send a purist into a funk.
That said, most people would be satisfied with those packages.
I set up these fabulous systems that can accurately reproduce the full range and volume of a 747 taking off and know the first thing the guy’s wife is going to say: “Can you turn that down a bit? More. No, more. A bit more.”
I think that you’re right. I just saw the RMS power = zero at one site and I doubt that it’s correct. It seems to me that RMS power should just = power.
You can talk about RMS voltage – this is the “DC equivalent voltage” for a periodic voltage waveform. In other words, let’s say a periodic voltage causes a resistor R to produce an average power of P watts. What would the “DC equivalent voltage” be? It would be sqrt(P * R). This value is called the RMS voltage of the periodic voltage waveform.
You can also talk about RMS current – this is the “DC equivalent current” for a periodic current waveform. In other words, let’s say a periodic current causes a resistor R to produce an average power of P watts. What would the “DC equivalent current” be? It would be sqrt(P/R). This value is called the RMS current of the periodic current waveform.
You can talk about peak power and average power, But it is nonsensical to talk about RMS power.
(Sure, you can mathematically calculate the RMS of any periodic signal, but there is no purpose to calculate RMS power.)
My guess is that when Crutchfield says “RMS power” they really mean “average power.”
Just to clear up any confusion, RMS Power (even though a misnomer) has a very specific meaning in the audio industry. Back in the 1960’s and early 70’s manufacturers of audio equipment began using very creative standards (to say the least) in order to advertise high power ratings. The FTC finally stepped in and set a standard so that power ratings could be compared between brands.
The standard calls for a sine wave measurement into a resistive load (usually 8 or 4 ohms). The advertised power is calculated using RMS values of voltage (hence the term “RMS” power). For a sine wave the RMS voltage is .707 times peak voltage. The frequency range must be specified over which this power can be produced indefinitely (usually 20 Hz - 20k Hz). The distortion must also be specified.
There are also “peak power” or “music power” ratings which may be much higher than the RMS rating. Some amps are designed to be able to provide much more power for brief periods than the continuous rating. This is a good thing, since music is nothing like a sine wave.
