Home Cinema/theatre systems?

[red dragon]

I want to buy a home cinema/theatre system for my husband for his birthday and/or christmas present. I know little about them, can someone advise me what I should be looking for, where to buy one, any ideas on price for something good? Should I be looking at something with a Blu-ray player or would that make it too expensive/complicated?
I had Mongkok was a good place for Electronics should I go there?

[Beuze]

If you dont know anything about the stuff going to mongkok is not recommended. You better check fortress or broadway.

[Shenzhener]

How much do you want to spend?

What sort of size speakers can you live with?

I bought my system last year, initially thought of buying Bose but ended up with a much bigger system. I spent much more than I budgeted too on speaker cables and leads.

[red dragon]

Hi, thanks for your replies. Problem is we already have a Panasonic DVD recorder which is quite a good one. I went to Fortress and Broadway but the assistants there didn't seem too helpful. I wanted to know if I could buy a sytem without another DVD player, but they didn't want to know.
Is it possible to buy the speakers and other stuff now and use our present DVD recorder ......and then later buy a new DVD player when Blu-ray is more common? Am I trying to make things too complicated? I was thinking about 4000HKD - is this realistic?

[imparanoic]

do you want performance and all in one convenice?
eg, if you want perfomance as well as flexibilty, go for a proper av amplifier, some thing like yamaha rx-363 or sony STR-DG520 (if you stretch more try a marantz or denon or onkyo) and a set of tannoys efx-5.1, you will find that the perfomance is unrivaled ( scale and realism) as well as faithful reproduction of movie soundtracks (and music) and you will endless options of connectivity and upgrade options, ps you will scare the neighbours as well, but these equipment take up space.

should you be able to stretch more and don't mind bigger speaker( even better peformance) get a really decent set up with some like mission m3i speaker set up.

Mission - M3i

or something more compact - kef kht series

KEF - Innovators in Sound - SURROUND SOUND SYSTEMS - home theatre - home theatre KHT1005.2

if you want convenice, but don't mind compromising performance, get an all in one, but beware all in one can break down ( i deal with a lot of insurance claims for these items ) as well as limited connectivity and no upgrade.

ps, the built in dvd player within a all in one system will be poor compare to your current dvd recorder ( assuming your using hdmi upscaling)

HK$4,000 is a starting point.

it's not just my opinion, Uk's magazine what hifi will say the same.

ps, broadway and fortress is a poor choice for any decent audio product, as you will need to demo the equipment in a proper demo room, just like you will test drive a car to see the characteristic suit you.

ps. also, spend 10-15% on cables, as you would not drink champange in a polystyrene cup.

[imparanoic]

the web sites :-

Yamaha

Sony Home AV - Sonystyle.com.hk

Tannoy

[imparanoic]

[url=http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html]intellexual net

[red dragon]

Hi Imparanoic,

Thank you SO MUCH for all your helpful information!! Sorry for the delay in replying but was away at weekend so couldn't log on.

Your links were very helpfu - except couldn't look at last one. Think as I'm running out of time and don't know where to start to look at all the things you have suggested, I'm going to go to Sony Centre followed your link for details and look at what they can provide as seperates or as one system.

Will let you know what I end up with..........

Thanks again!
Red Dragon

[campas12]

depending on how much you envision yourself/your husband spending, you may go for one of two options

home theater in box (htib)- this would include a reciever(amp) along with any number of speakers. this usually works well for most people since it does everything.

for the audiophile in you(him), you may want to just spend a decent amount on the reciever and let him pick a bunch of speakers after the fact...

[hk.com]

I just got a mix multimedia RM theater

It is a box wihout a hard disk which you connect to your network. It access all downloaded movies, MP3's music photos etc on your desktop... It does not have a built in hard disk so it is simpler but support more file formats than anything I've seen.

I was looking for one of these for months. I may buy a couple more for Xmas presents.