Need help.

[Rakewell]

Greetings peeps,

Can someone tell me what I would need for a decent sound system for my home theater?

I currently have an insignia receiver and two speakers.

The problem is that my DVDs/BRs are either too loud or too soft... I want a system that has decent balance between the two, so I don't have to spend the evening turning the volume up and down during my movies.

(My NYC neighbors would kill me otherwise.)

My question is: Can someone recommend a speaker system that won't break the bank, that'll give me equalized audio? My receiver is only a few years old, maybe I could add speakers? Or maybe a new system?

Thanks-

 

[donfm]

You have to narrow some things down first before anyone here can suggest you a system. What % will this be used for movies and music?

Let's start with what's your budget? How big is the room? Do you require really low bass for your home theater which would mean adding a subwoofer? Movies have loud passages and soft passages so no system is going to fix that problem. Do you want 5.1 or greater capability?

 

[SlitheryDee]

My receiver is pretty poor, but I achieved what you want by ripping my blu rays and using ffdshow to compress and normalize the audio. It probably helps a lot to have a center channel speaker as well, even though I imagine your blu ray player is defaulting to some kind of stereo format. You did check to make certain that your player is outputting a stereo signal right?

Does your receiver support any kind of surround sound audio? If it does, adding some speakers may help, but that wasn't enough for me. I paired my cheap RCS receiver with some decent polk audio speakers and I still found myself changing the volume in quiet parts of movies. There are receivers that offer the kind of compression that I'm getting from my HTPC though. The ones I've seen were usually pretty expensive. For instance Onkyo has a feature called Audyssey Dynamic Volume which basically dynamically controls the volume level to raise the volume of quiet sections and lower the volume of loud sections as the occur.

 

[Mopetar]

You could look into buying a compressor or limiter too hook into your audio system which could help normalize the audio. That might be a cheaper option than getting a whole new setup. Otherwise you could check your receivers settings to see if it has any options like this.

 

[Rakewell]

You could look into buying a compressor or limiter too hook into your audio system which could help normalize the audio. That might be a cheaper option than getting a whole new setup. Otherwise you could check your receivers settings to see if it has any options like this.

Receiver is pretty basic, I'm afraid.

Can you recommend a compressor/limiter? Not sure I know what I'm looking for...