Old fart gets speaker questions resolved!

[Flea77]

A while back I posted about HT speakers not having woofers, and that none of the new ones had any bass at all. Well I learned a lot, bought some speakers, and am a happy camper, but it was a lot of work to get there! Here are some things I learned:

1) Forget asking anyone at Fry's, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc anything, they are too young to know what woofers are (they think they are the same as sub-woofers), or for that matter, have never heard of super-tweeters either.

2) Forget the idea of listening to the speakers at any of the above places, their setups are horrible!

After going all over the place, I found a Circuit City that had a listening room where there were no employees, no switchers to listen to different speakers, no TV or projector for video, wires hanging all over the place, in other words, a godsend!

I proceeded to rewire everything to get the speakers I wanted to test hooked up, then reconfigured everything in the receiver to where I thought it should be, and low and behold, the speakers sounded great! It took me about 30 minutes to redo everything and run some tests, but I was happy.

I got the speakers home only to find out my receiver would not do some of the things the one in the store did, so back I went to get a new receiver. Now all is well, I have a home theater system where door slams sound like door slams, gunshots sound like gunshots, and music (DVD-Audio) sounds fantastic (Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave sends tingles up my spine!).

I am thinking about replacing the center channel to go from 2x5.25" drivers and a tweeter to 2x6.5" drivers and a tweeter for a little more depth in the center, but for now, I am pretty happy. The clarity is outstanding!

What I got:

Onkyo SR505 (Double Bass: ON, Crossover: 60hz, Cinema EQ: ON)
Polk Monitor 70s front L and R
Polk R50s surround L and R
Cerwin Vega LS-5C center (already had)
Sony SA-WM40 subwoofer (already had)

Here is a rather rushed picture of my setup so far:


Thanks for your help!

Allan