Looking to buy home theater speakers

Ray-Briggs

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Jun 30, 2015
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I'm going to buy new speakers with an amp, but im not sure which ones to go for. My budget is around $800. That's with an amp. Any ideas?
 
By amp do you mean the receiver with HDMI input and everything?

How big is the space you are wanting to have surround sound, and are you looking for 5.1 or 7.1?

For your budget a Yamaha receiver is going to be really good for you.
You can go basic to a lot of bells and whistles including wifi/Bluetooth/Pandora/airplay/and also even directly access upnp/dlna media servers like windows media player.
Another nice thing about Yamaha is that you don't need a special (expensive) adapter for iPod/iPhone, just use your normal usb cable.
 
Energy Take Classics is a tried and true speaker set, cant go wrong with it. The only concern was if you had a very large living room/kitchen space with vaulted ceilings then you would need a more powerful sub. For your basement setup you should be perfectly fine with the energy subwoofer, if you ever outgrow it then the BIC F12 is hard to beat at its $200 price point.

Get that Energy Take Classic speaker set and one of the two Yamaha receivers I listed earlier and you will be good to go.
 
You will need one of these cables, as the Energy sub is L/R RCA and the receiver output is a single RCA cable: http://www.amazon.ca/Monoprice-106261-Digital-Coaxial-Splitter/dp/B003L1AGVS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436804154&sr=8-1&keywords=digital+rca+splitter

Here is amazon Canada for Yamaha receivers:
The 677 model (the second one I posted earlier) is way more expensive in Canada but the 577 that has only a few less options is much cheaper:
http://www.amazon.ca/Yamaha-RX-V577-7-2-channel-Network-Receiver/dp/B00ILCRZRK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436804101&sr=8-1&keywords=yamaha+rx-v577
Then you can always go a little more basic with the 477 model: http://www.amazon.ca/Yamaha-RX-V477-5-1-channel-Network-Receiver/dp/B00ILCS11E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436804092&sr=8-1&keywords=yamaha+rx-v477
 
I would pick the energy set over those. H.K. makes decent stuff but the energy take classic set is well balanced and designed and people have raved over them for years.

As stated, for the price range you just cant go wrong; you would have to really up budget and get a set from someone like Kiplisch to get a difference, and even then the difference would be minimal if you did not have the tuned ears of an elitist audiophile.