All right. I found a place about an hour from where I live that has "every" Klipsch speaker in stock and ready to listen to. "Every" is in quotation marks because they didn't have the Synergy series, which is the one we were looking at. Before going there (this was Bry's in Marysville, WA, by the way), I looked at a bunch of specs on the Klipsch Reference series, and boy did I like what I saw. I did some research on the difference between these two series, and apparently the Synergy speakers are budget and are built cheaper. The Reference speakers are built with better materials and are supposed to sound better. So we went and listened to the RB-42s (bookshelf speakers) and the RF-42s (floorstanding speakers). The tower speakers were obviously more impressive, and they won me over. But after doing some more research, we decided to go one more level up and get the 52 package.
Yes, this means we went waaaay over budget. Our reasoning was that we wanted this to be the last speakers we buy for a very long time, so we decided not to settle. We found a package online from an authorized Klipsch dealer (
AcousticSoundDesign). They have a ton of packages for great prices, but we decided to give Bry's a chance before we pulled the trigger with the online purchase. Bry's did pretty good, so we went with them. Here's what we got:
Fronts (2 at $338 each):
*
Center (1 at $297):
*
Surrounds (2 at $300 each):
*
Subwoofer (1 at $540):
*
Receiver ($450):
http://tinyurl.com/k8pc92x
Klipsch says its Reference 52 package comes with 42 surrounds, but we went with 52. We also got the 12-inch subwoofer instead of the 10-inch for obvious reasons. We could have saved around $200 by going with the online package, but that package came with a BIC subwoofer, and we had already listened to the Klipsch and liked it. And I like the idea of having matching everything--it's neater that way. Also, Bry's offers a free lifetime warranty on all Klipsch speakers, and they service everything there. And I avoided any potential mishaps with shipping, which has happened to quite a few people buying from the online site (I should mention that Acoustic Sound Design always seems to make it right).
We went with the Onkyo receiver because of a lot of good reviews, including one very in-depth one. That review won me over:
Onkyo TX-NR626 AV Receiver Reviewed I also like how it's 7.2, which allows room for growth in the future.
We went with Klipsch because it sounds great! We LIKE how clear it is in the upper register. It doesn't seem too bright to us at all. I am really excited to set this stuff up. All I have now is the sub and the center speaker; the other things weren't in stock. So Bry's will be driving those to our house in five-ish days. We also ordered our TV off Amazon and will get that in about a week. So I will come back on here and say how everything sounds in a couple weeks. I've heard speakers need breaking in, so I won't post right away. Here's to hoping everything works out! Now to buy some speaker wire . . . I'll take a look at the sites you pointed out to me on the first page of this thread, Pyrrho.
Thank you to everyone for taking the time to help me out! You were all right; we needed to listen to the speakers to determine for ourselves if they were right for us. It seems we're in the minority on this site, so I wanted to post all this to let other new people know that Klipsch is worth listening to. It's a shame I didn't get a chance to listen to the Synergy series so I could give my opinion of them. I have a feeling they'd work just fine for some people, though.
