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Basic Setup Question

post #1 of 3
8/3/09 at 9:15am
Thread Starter 
Hey guys - thanks for taking a look. 

I'm going to be doing some heavy purchasing in about a month; I haven't looked at specific hardware quite yet, but I do have some high-level questions.

My laptop has a BluRay drive, so I plan on using an HDMI cable to connect my laptop to the receiver.  The laptop itself has a beefy video card, but I'm thinking I'll need an external sound card to make the sound nice.  Any nput here would be great. 

I would like to have my Wii hooked up to the reciever as well, but with the laptop pushing music through the speakers at the same time.  Do recievers typically support this "dual-channel" functionality?  The laptop would be sitting next to the system with iTunes opened up playing music while the Wii is being used.  Ideally I could control the volumes of each source from the reciever, but that seems pushy. 

Regarding the sound setup - would you mix/match floor standing speakers and surround speakers with subs etc, or get an all-in-one theater setup?  I'm a little concerned that the reciever won't be easy to configure if I have all these speakers from different manufacturers, but sometimes I see a good deal on 2 floor speakers, and then 2 different surround speakers, and then a good deal on a sub or center speaker.  

Sorry for the length - thanks for your time :)
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post #2 of 3
8/3/09 at 9:31am
Not sure if any receivers would let you show video from one source while playing audio from another, or how you'd do it, so I'll leave that to others.  Regarding speakers:  There are advantages to using a matched set, but you can also mix and match.  Subwoofers do a completely different job than all the other speakers, and therefore are the least in need of matching everything else.  You can also get away with surrounds that are different than the front speakers (although they should match one another.)  They carry mostly ambient sound and come from a different direction anyway, so differences in tonal quality between them and the fronts won't be very apparent.

However, the three front speakers must be timbre matched.  Otherwise you're going to get a distinct "break" anytime music or dialogue pans from one side of the screen to another.  The speakers shouldn't only be from the same maker, they should be from the same speaker series, ideally designed to work as a unit.  (My Atlantic Technology center channel is basically identical to my left and right front speakers except that the drivers are mounted horizontally instead of vertically.)  In theory you could find a center channel from one manufacturer that exactly matches the front speakers from another, but the odds are heavily against you.  And if you're buying the front three speakers from one source, odds are you're going to get a very good deal buying the surrounds as part of the same package.

Regards,

Joe
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post #3 of 3
8/6/09 at 12:33pm
Thread Starter 
Thank you - I actually just found this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882120123

For $599.  The setup has good reviews... I was going to try and get floor-standing speakers for the fronts, but my apartment is relatively small so hopefully these won't be too shabby. 

It would be pretty cool to have A/V from the wii working, and ALSO the audio from a macbook.  I wonder if I could "join" the two audio signals from the wii and hdmi from the mac to do this. 
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