What we chose....

[pianogal]

Thank you for all your help and answers last week. We did take your advice over the weekend and drove out of town to listen to several types of speakers. The lines we ended up hearing were: Vienna Acoustics (fantastic for music - WOW!), Definitive Technology, Boston Acoustics, and Klipsch.

Out of all the above, we liked the Klipsch the best for movies - which is our purpose for the home theater. It will be a dedicated room to watch movies only. The Klipsch system was really the only one that made us feel as if we were sitting in the local Regal Cinema. Perhaps it was the horns. The Vienna's were awesome but mostly out of our price range. All of them sounded great to our ears - but for movies the horn driven speakers won out.....especially for my husband.

We ended up purchasing the Klipsch RB 61, RC 52, RS 42 and RW 10D.

Now we are researching a receiver and looking at either the Denon 2309 or the new Denon 1910 or should we stretch and go with something a little more amps per channel? The store pushed higher end Pioneer receivers - but we have a cheap Pioneer system already and I have never been really impressed with Pioneeer...granted our old system was a cheap (>$600).

Thanks so much!!!

 

[CraigV]

Mating a Denon with Klipsch will be a good match. Klipsch are know for being very efficient speakers, i.e. they can play loud without a whole lot of watts. Unless you plan on playing your movies loud enough to disturb the neighborhood, buy something with modest power, but that has the features you want, and is as “future proof” as it can be.

 

[Davemcc]

The Klipsch are efficient so you can easily get away with an inexpensive receiver. However, there has been some technical discussion (way over my head) about frequency specific impedance dips that can make the Klipsch somewhat hard to drive at high volume. This suggests that you might want a more solid amp if you want to get the best performance out of them if you intend to drive them hard.

That might make me leery of the ICE amps in the high end Pioneers. The Denon 2309 is about the lowest model of receiver I'd be comfortable with. I would suggest that you look at the impedance rating of the receivers you're looking at and choose one certified for low impedance loads. Also consider options from Onkyo and Yamaha. Other than that, just make sure that you get all the features that you expect to use.