2 speaker surround sound

[moeror]

For TV surround sound systems, is 2 speaker systems viable enough? Or do you really get best results from those multi speaker ones?

 

[americanaudiophile]

You cannot get surround sound out of 2 speakers. If you are not concerned about special effects then 2 or 3 speakers are fine. The center or dialogue speaker allows for clearer voices which is important. Good sound is more important than surround sound. A sub woofer reproduces the low frequency sounds that make explosions and music have more impact and weight.

 

[ssddx]

actually if you want to get technical.... you "can" use multiple smaller sound systems to re-create surround sound.

if the systems take 3.5mm as an input and you use something like a hdmi to 5.1 extractor with hdmi passthrough to pass video along via hdmi but pull off the different channels in single rca plugs you could run anything from a 5.1 to 6.3. now, you wont get anything which sounds exactly like 5.1 and a 5.1 set is likely going to be quite a bit cheaper and also sound better as well which makes this highly impractical unless you just happened to have lots of stuff laying around you got for free.

can you get surround sound out of 2.0/2.1 speakers? no, but you can get virtual surround sound (simulated) if you ran something like dolby virtual speaker. to be honest though i'd just run them in 2.0 or 2.1 as quality sound is better than surround sound effects.

your budget also affects what systems are ideal for you. if you wanted to step into the hifi world... you could get a set of energytake classic 5.1's for $350 and pair them up with a $150 receiver and have quite a good set for a low budget price. if that is too high of a price then you could get the monoprice 9774 (now called the 110565 apparently) for about $100 cheaper which are basically the same thing.

if that is too much budget then you could always run a z506 pc speaker set $100 with a hdmi audio extractor for 5.1 like some people do but quality is of course going to be less.

or you could run a 2.0, 2.1 or 3.1 setup.

lots of possibilities depending on what you need to connect and what your budget is.