A 5.0 home theater

My original setup from 2007 was pretty okay. Onkyo TX-SR605 A/V receiver connected to a Polk RM6750 “Home Theater in a Box” 5.1 speaker setup, with a Sony KDL-40V2500 TV mounted on the wall. It served me well for more than 12 years, but a new neighbor moved in downstairs and one unit over, and while I’m pretty sure the “vibrations” she was experiencing were my 78 year old next door neighbor watching Fox News piped through her Bose Acoustimass 10 system, I as the young(ish) guy was getting all the negative attention. So.

The new:

• Sony XBR-43X800E, looks amazing. Hooked up via HDMI with ARC, so I could, in theory, hook up consoles, etc. to it, but haven’t yet. Not using the smart TV functionality at all, and it’s not connected to the Internet. The HDMI ARC port is kind of awkwardly located on the side of the TV, so I used a TNP 4K 270° right angle HDMI cable to hook it up.
• Marantz NR1509. This thing sounds incredible. Especially in my small space, the 50W/channel is more than enough.
• KEF Q300 main speakers, on metal stands I’ve filled with sand (to reduce vibration and provide some stability against romping dogs). (The speakers are also attached to the stands with Velcro straps.) I had to hunt to find these new in box on, I think, eBay (might have been Audiogon). I really wanted the 300s, not the 350s, as the 300s have the port on the front, and (due to the dogs, small space, etc.) my speakers are too close to the walls for optimum sound from speakers with rear-facing ports.
• KEF Q600c center channel speaker, on the little media cabinet I have holding the gear (it’s cheap, but it encloses everything and puts all the gear behind glass, keeping dust and puppy noses out).
• The rear speakers are still the surround speakers from the Polk setup (they’re mounted on stands flanking the sofa, with flat speaker wire installed under the carpet when I replaced it a few years ago).
• A circa-2012 Panasonic DMP-BDT320 BluRay player, with the world’s worst remote control.
• An Apple TV 4th Generation.
• A Sony PlayStation 4 I picked up mostly so my brother could play his Christmas presents (including a VR headset) while he and my mom visited over the holidays; the 2019 Black Friday bundle pricing ($199) made it a no-brainer, considering my most recent consoles were an Xbox 360 I won at a holiday party in 2011, and a Nintendo Wii that pre-dated the Great Recession.
• Everything is hooked into a Netgear GSS108E switch (which also occasionally provides USB power to things like a Roku Express).
• TV is handled by an HD HomeRun Prime, that takes a cable card and exports a 1080p stream of our digital cable TV. (I wouldn’t have it, but it’s bundled into my HOA, and I can’t get out of it, so whatever. I have basic cable.) Only the PS4 and the Apple TV 4th Generation (and a Raspberry Pi I have setup with RetroPie, but that’s a hassle to use) are fast enough to handle the streams reliably, and only over Ethernet, but it works well enough.

It’s not amazing but it gets the job done, and there haven’t been any “vibration” complaints since. As you’d expect, the low-lows peter out quickly at higher volumes, but it’s still more than enough to fill that relatively small space with sound, and music sounds fantastic! Even if it’s “just” my iPhone streaming over AirPlay (which the Marantz supports natively).

Meanwhile, the bedroom gets all the “leftover” stuff:

• Circa 2012 Panasonic TC-L32X5 32" Viera 720p TV (again, the picture quality is phenomenal, even if the set itself is nothing special these days). (Originally this was exporting audio via TOSlink (with the TV set to PCM mode) and a line level adapter to feed a JVC RX-515V receiver I’ve had since I was 16.)
• That old Onkyo TX-SR605. (Does upscaling for analog sources, etc. Great unit. What happened to Onkyo? I got burned by the “HDMI board” issue... My TX-NR717 had the HDMI board replaced once, and then failed again in January 2019, just after the extended warranty expired...)
• JBL Northridge N38 floor speakers (circa 2000?)
• JBL Loft 20 center channel speaker (eBay; honestly just got it ’cause it more or less matched the Northridge speakers; it replaced the passive unit from an MAudio desktop monitor speaker pair, where the active side had gone really really quiet).
• A circa-2012 Panasonic DMP-BDT220 BluRay player (found it open box at Best Buy back then)
• A circa-1993 (!) NAD 505 CD player, hooked up to the Onkyo via a coaxial “digital” connection. Sounds incredible and still works perfectly, after all these years.
• A Roku Express (less and less useful; no HBO Max, the apps I’ve found that should stream from my home network don’t, or don’t do so reliably; the processor and/or the WiFi connection aren’t enough to keep up with the HomeRun Prime stream...)
• A Panasonic PV-S7680 S-VHS VCR

Does the job. Gets used infrequently.