I was faced with the same dilemma as you, and rather than combine the two, I chose to put together a seperate home theatre system. Same room, two different systems. How do you fit so many speakers in one room? Well, I'm not about to move my Martin Logan ReQuests, so I found the smallest, decent speaker I could for HT, Gallo Nucleus. These speakers are about the size of a softball, mounted on the walls you barely notice them. The sub is the size of a bowling ball, and like most subs doesn't matter that much where you put'em. I picked up a NAD T760 Receiver and Toshiba DVD player, along with the Direct TV dish I already had, and voila, HT without contaminating my audio only rig. The HT electronics all fit in my 36" Sony TV base. Once finished, the whole thing cost me $2000 and does the job. The biggest pain in the ass and expense was running the wire (I used Monster 16 gauge with quality banana plugs); throw in various cables (RCA 75 ohm from the DVD, Toslink from the set-top box) and several S-Video and analog RCA IC's, and it was a little pricey and a pain. In any event, if you'd like more info or pics, feel free to email me at [email protected]
Home Cinema Poisoning my System?
I love movies and enjoy tinkering with home cinema gear but my priority is music and I am concerned about the addition of home cinema equipment to my system and listening room. Is it possible to merely overlay the additional channels to an otherwise hardcore obssessive 2-channel system without ill effect? Rather than a combined system, it seems one could tap the audiophile pre-out into a separate processor/preamp/receiver etc which then went into the center and rear speakers, thereby being "separate" from the 2-channel system and switching the whole cheesey suburban Matrix demoing thing off when listeing to Wagner. Is this a popular configuration? If so, would it also make sense to use a matching stereo speaker for the center speaker instead of a home cinema center speaker? It seems to me that 3 ML SL-3s, for example, would be more "matched" than SL-3s and their center channel home cinema speaker. Thank you for your comments and ideas.