Sound Quality and Games; Opinions

[CRTGAMER]

Its all in the Speaker placement
I noticed a couple of trends in the last few years.

Surround Sound Add On
An additional amp with at least five speakers. Each corner of the room would get the compact speakers. Most would follow the instructions and put the loud woofer in front which leads to most sound coming from the front. I would at least put that woofer behind the couch and if the TV has decent speakers, keep them on as well.

Sound Bar
This seems to be the current trend to cut down on all the extra speakers spotted thru out the room. The problem is all the sound is blasting from the front of the room which is plain silly. That Sound Bar should be placed back by the couch with each speaker separated and placed at each corner.

My old Stereo
Hooked up to the TV audio out to my Aiwa aux in, for me more this is more then adequate. Two speakers, placed up high of the couch on each side facing towards each other. This complements the HD CRT which has a "Bose Reflect" third speaker built in it. The sound has proper separation, when something happens on the left of the screen, the sound is on the left as well as the front. When both channels are used in a scene, you are literally "surround sounded".

[sonic2041]

I currently run a 5.0 set-up with a Sony STR-DA5400ES, and I like the sound quality it produces. For me, quality audio is important for whatever I do, I really enjoy SNES audio through a good audio set-up.

Some thoughts on audio in general:

Getting a receiver that allows you to connect a microphone to automatically tune your speakers makes a world of difference when setting up surround sound. I used to use a few different receivers that did not offer this, and the difference a surround sound set-up with properly tuned levels makes is like night and day.

I think that any external audio source is better than any tv speakers, even if you use and old receiver you have laying around with a cheap set of bookshelf speakers you will be able to achieve fairly good audio.

Always use digital connections (or 5.1/7.1 outputs depending on which device you want decoding the audio) when you can for surround sound sources, I have never heard anything good come out of surround sound with stereo plugs.