strawtarget

OMG!!!!!!!!!!! After a long ordeal, I ended up with quite a great setup, in my humble opinion.

First the story...
I ordered the Altec Lansing ADA885 setup (the THX ones... neato) and they arrived the next day. They appeared to be very well constructed... nice high quality stuff. But when I tried to set the system up... I realized that there were two show-stopping problems. Number 1, the cords supplied with the speakers were very short. If you want the sattelites farther than 5 feet from your computer, you're pretty much out of luck. They use a funky cable (actually a macintosh 8-pin mini din printer cable) for the front 2 speakers. Each cable is maybe 10 feet long. No good. I plugged the speakers in so I could listen to 'em before deciding how to proceed. They sounded pretty good. Much better than my current setup... not $150 better, but better and worth the extra effort.

So I went forth to buy extension cables that would allow me to use the speakers. I also bought extensions for the rear speakers... just a standard mono plug. So $35 in cables later, I get back home to find out that Altec has not only color-coded the plugs and sockets, but they've added weird plastic shapes so that you are forced to plug the right thing into the right hole. But in the process, this keeps you from being able to use 3rd party cables without taking a pocketknife to the plug shielding and "trimming the fat". Ugh. Even after slicing the extension cables to the metal shielding, the fit was still sloppy and dubious at best.

The second show stopper? The speakers weren't designed for wall mounting. I want a speaker in each corner of my room, mounted on the wall. These have rubber feet so that they can sit on a desk, but they have no mounting holes for brackets or nailheads or anything. For my last setup, I got some of the "as seen on TV" shelves that attach to the corner of a room by sticking the wall with razorblades. Not very structurally sound, but they worked great with my old speakers. These are about 4 times heavier, though, and I wasn't willing to chance it. After a certain amount of effort trying to engineer some other solution at Home Depot, I decided it wasn't worth it and packaged the speakers back up and retured them.

So what did I get instead? The JVC set that ObsessTT reccommended. Oh my dear lord. They kick the crap out of the ADA885s and the Klipsch speakers, which I saw at the store and had a chance to test. Not just by a little bit... by a HUGE amount of sound and sound quality. This setup is really the perfect thing for my 12x10 foot office. Sure, I spent $125 more than I would have with the klipsch or the altec setups, but there is easily more than $125 worth of difference in the sound. Plus I can listen to the radio now. The sound is clean past the point when it hurts my ears. It does start to distort a bit further beyond that point, so it might not be the best solution for an actual home theater in a room larger than mine where volumes must be higher.

And WOW... easy setup. I love being able to cut my own wires however long I choose. I was worried that these speakers would have fixed wires on one end and I'd have to solder extensions on... but not the case! Standard speakerwire crimps on the back of each speaker! The setup came with generous amounts of wire... I only had to cut a custom wire for the one sattelite in the opposite corner of the room from the receiver. I'm way pleased, even if I did break my original budget by a tad.

I just want to thank everyone for their input and suggestions.

Lone Starr (Ivan)

I am glad you are happy with it.

I have Yamaha speakers for my PC and I have been looking for the sub that goes with them. The Yamahas are a PC speaker model and are very clean sounding but have no bass.

Great sound, beautiful cars and women that love us. What is better than this?

strawtarget

I sure can't think of anything better. BTW, "American Beauty" score 1st test CD.

Lone Starr (Ivan)

Play track 4 for me!