Hi, therron!
Welcome to the forum! I'm really happy that you found my post here of interest, and I'm more than happy to offer my opinion in answering your questions. Please don't apologize at all! We all started in the exact same situation as yourself
And really, it's because of that shared experience that I made this post and suggested these products. Like you say, the audio portion is around twice the price of a typical HTiB or entry-level package system. And those systems are often considered a very good value for the price. The Energy Take 5.1 speaker package is certainly not "bad" by any means! It's actually pretty impressive. But there are some really good reasons to step up to a price point and a system like the one I've put together here. And that's really the meat of your question, isn't it?
My first surround sound system was a HTiB. This is going back about 13 or 14years now. The internet was a different place back then
But I still went online, did as much research as I could, and wound up spending about $400 on an all-in-one HTiB. And I was pretty happy with it...for about 3 months
Now, something like the Energy Take speakers are better than the speakers that I got with that HTiB. So the gap might not be quite as wide as going from a current all-in-one system like the popular, but pretty crappy sounding Samsung systems or the LG systems or what-have-you. The current Onkyo, Denon or Yamaha all-in-one systems are fairly decent, and probably a bit better than the HTiB that I bought 13 years ago.
But it's important to realize that you really are talking about the absolute minimum with these $500-$700 systems. I won't say they're "bad", because they're not! They're certainly a big step up over the speakers that are built into any flat panel TV, and they're a clear step up over something like a Bose Acoustimass system, even though the Bose systems cost well over $1000 most of the time!
That right there is why every forum and message board will always yell at you to avoid Bose like the plague! They are just a terrible, terrible rip off.
But getting back to the point, what do you get for around double the price?
First and foremost is the subwoofer. Going from a HTiB subwoofer or a small 5.1 package subwoofer to the STF-2 that I've recommended here is a HUGE leap up in performance. The STF-2 plays much lower, has much more impact, much more tactile "hit you in the chest" FEELING. And it's a more accurate subwoofer with much higher resolution so that you can actually listen to music and hear clear, articulate bass that sounds much much more like real life. The subwoofer alone is about $365 (at the current sale price and including shipping), but I can promise you that it is SO worth while. More than anything else, having that strong, clear, tactile bass is what makes it FEEL as though you're "at the movies". The HTiB and small package system subs just don't come anywhere close. So why waste the money in the first place? In my own experience all those years back, the HTiB sub was the most obviously disappointing component. I wanted to upgrade that sucker pretty much right away!
Are there decent subs that cost a bit less than the STF-2? Sort of. I mean, Energy makes a pretty nice 10" sub as well that goes for a lower price. But here's the thing. I tend to think of certain products as being like "checkpoints" in terms of price/performance ratio. Every once in a while, a product will come along that rather clearly outperforms everything that costs the same or less, and it comes darn close or even equals a lot of competing products that cost more. It's also a product that demands you pay at least around twice its price, and often a lot more than that, in order to get something that is genuinely and clearly "better" in multiple ways.
The STF-2 is a "checkpoint" product for me. So too are the Rythmik FV12 (sadly discontinued and I'm not sure when the replacement will be available) and the big brother of the STF-2, the HSU VTF-2 MK4. Those are $550 (plus shipping) subs that are the least expensive subs that I consider capable of "doing it all". By "doing it all", I mean that they can play right down to 20Hz, while staying clean, clear, articulate and full of tactile impact.
The STF-2 only gives up a little bit of the lowest of the low extension, and it gives up some sheer output loudness to those $550 subs. But what makes the STF-2 a "checkpoint" for me is that it plays lower, louder, cleaner and just plain better than pretty much anything costing less or the same. And you HAVE to step up to the $550 price point to get anything genuinely "better", IMO. And vs. the HTiB subs, it's just a monumental difference.
For the speakers, the surrounds are easy to describe their value because they are a diffuse bi-pole design, which you just won't find in any HTiB or small package system. A lot of people mistakenly think that the "surround" speakers are supposed to be "back" speakers. They're not. They're "surrounds". They're meant to go to the sides, not the back, and they're meant to be 2-3 feet above you head when you're sitting down. The idea is to mimick the surround speakers that you'd find in a movie theater. Those are on the side walls and way up high. But in a movie theater, there are also multiple surround speakers lining the side walls. Having all those speakers creates a very diffuse and enveloping sound that "blankets" the audience. Using diffuse speakers like the Emotiva XRS-4.1 and positioning them correctly better mimicks the movie theater sound
Now, the front speakers might be the hardest to explain in words, but next to the subwoofer, they're the most obvious when you simply hear them for yourself.
You say you're not really familiar with listening to a great home theater. But I'm betting you've been to a movie theater! And you've probably been to a concert or a live music performance of some kind. And obviously, you hear sounds every day! So you're an experienced listener whether you think you are or not
You might not be an "audiophile" yet. You might not be a
critical listener yet. You might not be able to describe the differences in sound that you hear in audio jargon terms and point out differences on a graph or by labelling them with exact frequencies and Hz. But you CAN pick out when something doesn't sound like real life. You can do that easily!
And you can tell when a movie doesn't sound like the movie theater, and when music doesn't sound like it does when you listen to it being performed live.
With a HTiB or a small speaker package, to put it simply, there's just a lot "missing". HTiB and very small speakers often cannot play low enough to properly blend with the subwoofer, so you end up with a "hole" where the speakers can't play low enough and the subwoofer can't play high enough. Much worse than that though, very inexpensive speakers distort. There are many, many forms of distortion. But an easy way to think about it is like this:
every recording sends a signal to the speakers. It tells the speakers to play a certain note for a certain length of time at a certain volume of loudness relative to all the other notes. Any deviation away from what the signal is telling the speakers to do is a form of distortion.
So the worst would be to just play the wrong notes! That's not very common. But it IS common that additional notes that aren't actually in the recording get produced. This is harmonic and intermodulation distortion, and it's also sometimes just plain "noise".
There's a funny thing about human hearing. When we say that something sounds "loud", what we're almost always actually responding to is harmonic distortion and/or noise. When a very distortion free speaker plays very very loud, it doesn't sound "loud" to us. It just sounds "closer". It's distortion that bothers our ears. When the sound is "clean", it doesn't seem to get "louder", just "closer".
Cheap speakers will very often fail to produce the notes in the signal at the correct relative loudness to all the other notes. This is called the "frequency response". Tell the cheap speaker to play a certain frequency (aka. note) at a certain volume level, and it might play it too loud or too quiet. If you want to hear an accurate reproduction of your recordings, the speaker's frequency response has to be accurate!
The most challenging thing is to get the note to start and stop exactly when the signal says. This is called the "transient response". The drivers in any speaker physically move. So they have to react very quickly when the signal tells them to start producing a note, and then they have to stop on a dime when the signal says, "STOP!" That's difficult because of inertia. Once the driver is moving, it wants to KEEP moving!
So put it all together, and that's what makes the more expensive speakers worth the extra money. They have more accurate frequency response. They have less distortion and noise. And the transient response is where you can easily start to spend A LOT of money, chasing after very small improvements that are very difficult to come by. Audiophiles talk about "air" between the notes and "delineation" of one instrument or sound from another. That's largely due to the transient response, as well as having very low distortion, obviously
The HTM-200 speakers are another "checkpoint". More than that though, they have a unique shape and design that makes them extremely versatile. Far more versatile than most other speakers. Being sealed, quite thin (just a bit over 6 inches from front to back), and having controlled dispersion of the tweeter due to the offset placement means that the HTM-200 can be placed in almost any position and still sound very good!
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