tales of the home theatre

so warren, eric, ivy, and i went to the local magnolia audio/video store to audition some speakers. i already had a pretty good idea of what i wanted there. i wanted to give a listen to the mythos line again as a sanity check to make sure that the speakers that i wanted to get produced an acceptable sound. i also wanted to audition the surround speakers and subwoofer which i have been really unsure about.

this entire journey has been pretty educational. i never realized how much thought and effort goes into planning a home theatre solution. i never realized how much of a difference it makes to get quality gear. or, rather, i never realized how much of a difference it is from a home theatre in a box solution to something that is hand-picked. i’m sure that real audiophiles will still scoff at the compromises i’ve made, but there’s definitely a budget element here that i had to address as well.

something that really annoys me about the audio industry is that components are not readily and easily accessible online. once you go out of the consumer level of equipment, the rest of the gear is actually very hard to buy online. what’s worse is that it’s very hard to give the spearkers that you do want a listen. brick and mortars tend to carry a limited stock and they may not have the best environments set up to listen to the speakers. just yesterday, i listened to a $500 speaker that was positioned poorly and sounded worse than my $50 speakers at home.

it seems to be, amongst audiophiles, that they tell people to go listen, listen, listen. if you like what you hear, you should go buy it. don’t go for the hype, you don’t want to pay for hype, you want to pay for what you like.

eric and i ended up buying speakers at magnolia and ended up getting a pretty decent deal. i’m pretty happy with it so i’ll be soon hooking everything up.

that being said, here’s a rather verbose breakdown of what i ended up getting:
outlaw audio model 1070
ref=”http://www.definitivetechnology.com/loudspeakers/mythos/mythos_table.html#mythos6″>definitive technology mythos sixes for front left and right
definitive technology mytho seven center channel
definitive technology mythos gem compact for surrounds
definitice technology supercube III
16AWG oxygen-free copper speaker cable
dayton bags-g banana speaker plugs