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acruxksa · Rated XXX

Don't go Bose! I'm not kidding, there are much better options out there.

Spend a bit of time cruising AVS Forum's audio section. The HTIB (home theater in a box) options are easy, but you can get much better for about the same price or just slightly more $$ You've got a pretty good receiver and I'm guessing you spent some time researching it, spend at least as much time on the speakers. If you do decide to go with an HTIB, there are better options for less than the Bose.

I started out with an HTIB system many years ago and it was ok, but I really didn't know what I was missing. Over the years as I read more on the AVS forum I've replaced every single piece of that system a couple times over. My current 7.1 speaker setup cost about $1100 and consists of Polk Tsi 200 fronts, Tsi 100 sides and rears, CS10 center and a home made 10" sub with an SDX-10 Driver and Bash 340w digital amp. This system isn't anything special and if I lived in the lower 48 where shipping prices were better I would have Polk RTi's for nearly the same price.

The point is that My setup will blow the Bose system away and you could get a setup even better than mine for the same or less because of shipping. I'm not trying to promote polk, in fact I've recently purchased a set of Klipsch RB-61's for music in my bedroom and they're probably way better than the polks. What I'm trying to say is that you should look into other options before dropping $1000 on a Bose HTIB system. You won't regret it.

It takes a bit of work to properly setup your own home theater, your biggest concern is "timber" matching your fronts and center. Timber matching the rears isn't nearly as important. For a subwoofer, there are a couple very good internet direct options out there, Bic being one of them. I chose to build my own because i've never done it before and once I looked into it I became intrigued. You will learn that a subwoofer for watching movies needs to have a much lower frequency range than a music only sub. Movies frequently drop to 20Hz and below (audible frequency) while music rarely drops below 35Hz. A good home theater subwoofer should be able to go down to at least 25Hz and have a cut off below that to prevent driver damage (only an issue if you build your own). Timber matching isn't really hard, you just need to find front and center speakers from the same speaker line, in my case all my polks use the same drivers so even though the cabinets, number of drivers and driver configuration are slightly different the drivers are the same, meaning they're timber matched.

If you still want to go with an HTIB setup for simplicity and size, AVS forum has a dedicated HTIB section that will give you the information you need to make a good choice.
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