Audio is just as important as visuals. Don't believe me? Well, here's some 480p footage with great audio, and here is some crisp 4K with bad audio. That is why so many of you invest in upgrading your TV speakers, but here's

the thing: thousands of you every month are doing it wrong. When we looked at the Bose TV speaker a couple of years ago, we concluded that it was okay, but also that if you have this kind of money to spend, you can do much better. How much better?

How about a dedicated AV receiver? How about six-channel Dolby audio? How about all of that for less than the price of one of these? Don't believe me? Just watch. Step one is to rip out my bougie sound system. Step two: plug in the Bose TV

speaker for a before test. I'm still a part of the just like this. Sound fine? Not a lot of bass, but what do you expect? It's fine. Yep. Step three is to hit up the local Facebook Marketplace, where we found a total of three solutions that we think have a solid

crack at beating our Bose. And look at this: we also found this segue to our sponsor, Flexispot. Their Black Friday sale is on right now, and you can take an additional $50 off their E7 Plus standing desk and their C7 series of

Ergo chairs just by using our links and coupon code in the video description. Marketplace solution number one is the Sony HTSF2300. It may be a lowly home theater in a box kit, but it includes a dedicated, only semi-

proprietary receiver that's going to unlock a lot of options for us. These non-standard speaker connectors will be a minor thorn in our side later, as will the HDMI 1.2 connector when we need to grab a separate remote in order to change TV inputs or adjust volume, but

for the quality, I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it compared to our TV speaker. We'll be hooking this up using the same optical link that we used for the Bose TV speaker originally. We had hoped to find a receiver that would

handle video switching for us as well, but it turns out that even the worst ones that will handle 4K would have immediately blown our budget. Man, Toslink was so cool. The data rate started low and stayed low, so it can only do 5.1

but it's not susceptible to any kind of interference, which is uh, pretty cool. Now comes the part where we actually set everything up. Ah yes, how not tedious! Thankfully, he included the cables for those proprietary clips. Nice! You might have noticed by the way that we cheated

and totally did not take my gear out of here. Yeah, that's where we're ending that. We're needing to get a little bit creative about uh, speaker positioning here, but that's one of the drawbacks of a setup like this. By the way, this kit originally came out in July of 2007 and

was around $500 back then, or 750 adjusting for inflation. Thankfully, we only paid 40 Canadian dollars for this. Wow, that's a great value. I have high hopes. I mean, it even includes the stands. Oh, and they're height adjustable. That's pretty

Cool, yeah, a convenient thing about these kits is they typically come with all the cables you need, though I suspect in this case you'll probably want to cut it a little short, like how far back are they expecting you to put this thing, um, but

one thing that was missing from our kit, even though it came with it originally, is a calibration microphone. The good news is it should work with any omnidirectional mic, so we brought one from the office to give it a test. Oh yeah, that's not good. Okay, we might

have to just manually measure everything. Okay, we'll give that a try. I thought I'd try... Cool, yeah. Did you put batteries in the remote? No, sir. Oh wow, these expire in 2014. They aged like fine battery wine. Obviously, we could have spent a little bit more time on cable management

but in terms of just getting everything connected and powering the thing on, that was only about 5 [Music] minutes. I can already immediately notice the room being more full than the bow Soundbar. Well, like I mean, there's only so much that you can do with

computational bouncy nonsense. Having dedicated speakers, especially if you're going for an older or a more basic setup that is not going to be as modern, there's just no substitute for it. Yeah, this is immediately more immersive. What I didn't expect is that that easy. 40

bucks, yeah. Um, now I do think that there's probably some things we could tune. Whoever was using this before had their subwoofer at minus five, their surrounds at plus five, uh, so I think they just really wanted to hear a lot of surround. So I

just need to find a factory reset, clearing it takes about 30 seconds to clear it. Cleared that, was a very fast 30 seconds. Yep, that's what she said, you're rolling now. I hear that twice. A little bit of manual setup in

terms of making sure it's configured to the right setting, but alright. Should we try listening again? Yes, okay. We should probably set the distances for the speakers though, remember we factory reset it, we need a measuring tape. Okay, oh dude, is this tape measure not long enough? Oh, I think I broke it. No, I'm

good. I'll be right back. It's only a 6ft tape measure, cuz he's only 5'2. It doesn't matter. Oh, look at that, 10'8in. I think this bad boy is configured, okay. You ready? Let's watch a movie. I'm

actually very ready. I'm I'm kind of excited. Wow, dude, it crushes for $40. It destroys it. It, this is what, 5 the price? Yeah, well it's 40 Canadian, right? So that's crazy, that's like $30. [Applause]

US. It's not amazing, no. The bass in particular, kind of lacking, but what it is, is amazing for the price. Yeah, at a fraction of the cost of the Bose, it is multiple times better in every possible way, and we haven't even touched on one

of the biggest advantages, that's modularity. While our ancient optical connection prevents us from hooking up additional surrounds, a second sub, or height channels, the jump from stereo or an inexpensive soundbar to a dedicated 5.1 setup is way more noticeable than the jump from 5.1 to say

7.1 and coming back to modularity, nothing prevents us from taking those few channels that we do support and swapping out our speakers for something better, that is as long as everything is rated for the same impedance. More on that later. First, let's give it a try by

swapping out our left and right channels for these Philips FWB MC 50s. Just a quick snip job, a little strip, a little twist, making sure to match up the black striped cable with our black cable and finish it off with whatever fastener suits your purposes.

Yes, I know morett suck, I don't care, it's fine for what we're doing. Once again, we'd obviously do this a little differently in a final install, but the point is just to evaluate the sound quality, and we're not accounting for

these stands in our budget, cuz we could easily wall-mount these. We actually got a pretty good deal on these considering some eBay listings list them for triple the price, what we paid, 40 Canadian, just for these speakers. Okay, so now we're at 80 bucks. Let's see

if they improve our experience a lot. [Music] Those sound a lot better, yeah, they do. That is almost a bad thing in this case because it really draws your attention to how bad that center channel is. Yeah, the clarity, we're still missing the bass boom of a proper powered

subwoofer, but the clarity is a night and day difference, and just having that little wimpy thing mixed into it is like, like I don't know, it's like having someone talking over the person you're trying to have a conversation with. Again, modularity, you could swap it out though.

and you'll probably want to check this out guys I didn't think it'd be this obvious but like even through my lab mic over YouTube I bet you guys can hear the difference between those two and if you can't well hey just stick with the stock

speakers and be happy with better surround speaking of before we change out any speakers we want to upgrade our receiver to give ourselves better amplification for you know future proofing we'll talk about the exact one we chose in a minute but first there's

two major things you want to watch out for when you're shopping for a receiver one is the I/O if you're looking for video switching you need to ensure that at least the output of the receiver supports the minimum revision of HDMI that can handle the resolution and the

refresh rate that your TV is operating at number two is going to be the impedance rating if your speakers are higher than what your receiver can do you might not get the full volume or range whereas if they're too low your devices could overheat and even burn out

there is some wiggle room though as you're about to see have a look at this our STR-DA1000SS has a little switch to go between 4 and 8 ohms our speakers are rated for six so according to this

little label that's handily silkscreened right on the back we just need to switch it to 4 ohms and we should be good to go just from looking at the back you can tell this is a much higher end product with way more available inputs however

you can see that um HDMI is conspicuously absent so unless you're planning to hook your PS1 up to it you're not going to be using the video switching capabilities even the audio hookups are almost all stereo so they'd

only be useful for like a CD changer so we're going to be stuck with 5.1 over Optical but we're still going to have a much more potent amplifier oh don't don't put this in the video she cut my morrettes off do not put this in

the video people already hate me on the audio side though things are a little more interesting in addition to the digital input which is what we'll be using just like with this receiver it has a full 5.1 analog input which theoretically would allow us to use a

third-party decoder box to support more modern formats though we still wouldn't be getting height channels or secondary subwoofers or anything like that because those analog inputs are only 5.1 even though on the output side there appears to be support for more channels so we're

just going to use it as a better 5.1 amplifier now we're just about ready to try this thing out but we realized something our kit subwoofer doesn't use a standard connector this is a bit of a spoiler for later we did buy one more

kit that had this tuner of a sub we're just going to use it now okay perfect let's do it I can tell just from the weight that this is going to be one heck of an upgrade wait are we still using this for our Center channel right okay

we'll upgrade that later Oh, Bud, but don't even don't even worry about it it's a Wii sensor bar It's worth noting by the way that if your TV for whatever reason doesn't support Optical out you can also get these little ARC to

Optical adapters for about 20 bucks allowing you to use an older receiver like this with a more modern HDMI ARC setup Took us a little while to figure out the interface here but we've got our speaker setup config figured Okay 5.1

and then we've got all of our distances dialed in and the sub is not on Oh, the sub's working the sub's working The price we've paid at this point is a little bit complicated because we're using the center channel and rear channels from our original $40

setup we're using our $85 amp Is that all we paid for that Yeah, sick And then we borrowed the subwoofer from the $200 3.1 setup that we bought so and we're using the $40 Phillips as well We're at maybe a couple hundred bucks

Yeah, and again that's Canadian I'm still a part of [Music] the This sound quality is fine totally fine like dude the better amp it helps freaking slap Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to make that big of a difference with such basic speakers especially our

Center Channel but I mean part of what you're going to get from a better amp is cleaner output and this is a very musical section of this song so we're really taking advantage of the left and right [Music] channel I can see how people get

addicted to this yeah the constant like need to add the next speaker or the next receiver or center channel right tweak the next thing okay and we haven't even turned this up yet [Music] all I need is change all that Center channel is garbage

so it's time to jump ahead and uh get a new center channel in here shall we question for you as we're hooking this up these were part of another home theater in a box right I couldn't quite tell cuz all of these model numbers on these Sony's are

slightly different I think the three speakers we got were part of a kit the receiver that this seller was selling was part of a different kit and I don't believe this sub was part of that kit either no it wasn't for sure so I think

whoever we bought it from also was doing a mix and match of everything cool dude you versus the guy she tells you not to worry about exactly dude I am excited to see how this goes we're swapping those Philips bookshelves into our rear channels and then we're using

our new front channels which as you can see are a little [Applause] stronger what really blows my mind is that we have by no means dialed this in properly if I gave myself an afternoon to play around with it and fine-tune

it we went at the same price from yeah yeah it's better than the TV speakers but to good enough like I would never walk into someone's living room or theater room or whatever listen to these speakers and go yeah but they could be better yeah oh yeah they're good enough

yeah our total price was 325 Canadian or about 240 US so we were actually under the Bose TV speaker mean for our endgame setup for our endgame setup that we have right now we had enough left over that we could buy a DVD to watch on

[Laughter] it or hear me out maybe we put that toward a universal remote or something even with those inconveniences we basically crushed the competition everything from dialogue clarity to music quality to maximum volume to immersion is clearly better than our

Soundbar so why are sound bars so popular well if you were watching this going gee that looked pretty inconvenient you're not wrong there's all the cabling for starters and even more so the effort of tracking down the right products that are going to operate

together and the right deal because our answer it's not necessarily going to be the same as yours the odds that you guys find the exact speakers and receiver that we use today are slim to none but with that said I think it's safe to say

that if you're looking for a more immersive experience spending a little bit of time Googling model numbers looking over user manuals and maybe even giving them a quick listen before you buy could give you way better bang for your buck and even save you hundreds of

dollars compared to buying a brand new setup what you won't have to spend hundreds of dollars on is the segue to our sponsor that's free Flexispot right now is the perfect time to upgrade your work from home or office setup for Less

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sale today and save an additional $50 just by using our links and coupon code in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the original home theater video we did almost 2 years ago. It was one of my dreams to have this place set up and

those first impressions did not disappoint.

I Built a Home Theater for the Price of a Soundbar and it SLAPS!

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
