My newly-modified living room setup

Hey all,

I've really enjoyed looking through everyone's configurations here and it's lead to some updates to my own setup. We moved into a new (rental) home two months ago, and the much larger space was no match for my $550 Samsung HT-AS720 home theater in a box. So with that, I got myself a new 5.1 setup. And that in turn led to some furniture upgrades; the old coffee table was blocking the lower half of the new floorstanding speakers from the listening position, so I went with a new low-profile (and narrower) table.

I asked a ton of questions here and the AVSforum members helped me with literally every new component; the speakers, subwoofer, receiver, speaker stands and even the speaker wire. I really couldn't have done this without the help of this forum and the people on it. So with that said, here's my current configuration:

Samsung PN50B650 50" Plasma
Samsung BD-UP5000 Duo Blu-ray/HD DVD player
Pioneer VSX-521-K receiver
Pioneer SP-FS51-LR floorstanding speakers
Pioneer SP-BS21-LR bookshelf speakers
Emotiva Ultra 10 subwoofer
Sanus EF-28B 28" Euro speaker stands
Apple TV (2nd generation), xBox 360

And here's the pics. Thanks for looking!

Hey your pictures helped me decide to get the Pioneers! And the speakers are awesome, but to be honest I was worried for a few days about the FS51 floorstanders, as the sound wasn't great at first. Perhaps I ran MCACC too soon, but it's first EQ sounded considerably worse than with the EQ disabled, and it took me a few days to figure out it wasn't the speakers. Re-running MCACC after about a week resulted in drastically improved sound. And then getting the old coffee table out of the way made a world of difference as well; with the old table I couldn't even see the lower half of the speakers from the couch, which obviously didn't bode well for the sound. But now everything sounds great! I'm very happy with the pioneer set, especially since i got all of the speakers for half price through an employee discount.


Thanks BrolicBeast. Yeah I'm happy with the sub. It was by far the most expensive component of my new 5.1 setup, but with the money I saved on the Pioneer gear I wasn't going to go cheap on a sub (although obviously you can spend way more than $299 on a sub, with hearing the Emotiva I wonder why one woud need to). The Emotiva Ultra 10 is great; Gotta have those low frequencies and clean musical bass!


Thanks, and thanks for looking!

I'm not even sure what these speakers sound like without a sub to be honest. Some day I'll have to unplug the sub and re-run MCACC just to see what they sound like (the receiver won't allow me to simply disable the sub).

Thanks tsantanni. It's a rental so the color of the walls wasn't a choice of ours. Although some of my pictures make them appear yellow, they're actually very close in color to the wall your "this theater features" poster is hung along.

Lol, well maybe they won't remember what color the rooms were originally

Thanks! Yeah there aren't nearly as many people with these Pioneer speakers as there ought to be; they sound damn fine and for $385 msrp for the fronts, rears and center they're a steal. And considering i got them at half price, I highly doubt I could have gotten better bang for the buck.

Thanks! The tv stand I got in early 2008 from Racks and Stands. Oddly, it has gone up in price since then. Here's the product link:

http://www.racksandstands.com/Prepac...0-PRP1166.html

Thanks, Bud B! The tv stand is from racks and stands, here's the link:

http://www.racksandstands.com/Prepac...0-PRP1166.html

The shelves are adjustable, but the configuration I currently have them in is unfortunately the only way I could fit that monstrous center channel speaker in the shelf using the pre-drilled holes. If you're not trying to fit one those, you'll have a lot more options.

I don't worry about heat because the receiver has several inches of free space behind it. That said, once i get a thinner blu-ray player I will likely drill custom holes to lower the shelf that the VSX-521-K sits on even more.

Thanks everybody! The photos were taken with a Nikon D5000 using the 18-55mm 3.5 kit lens for the wide shots and the Nikor 35mm 1.8 Prime lens for the close-ups. I adjusted color, white balance, levels etc in a software program called Aperture which Apple makes. This year's equivelant to that camera model is the Nikon D5100.

Thanks for the recommendation on the angle of the speakers. The way the speakers are toed in is what the manual recommended, and i prefer it as it puts more distance between the "blow hole" (whatever you call it) in the back of the speakers and the wall. Least importantly, I think they look better this way than straight

It's not ideal to have the speakers where I have them, but so long as you have a receiver with room calibration (like MCACC on the Pioneers) it gets the job done. Ideally the rear speakers would be much farther back to eliminate the "speaker firing in my ear" effect ruining the illusion that surround sound is supposed to create.





Thanks everybody! I like the speakers very much, pokekevin