Home Theater Receiver Plus Surround Sound Speakers
If you don’t care about the supposed convenience and simplicity of setting up a “wireless” surround sound system and/or simply prefer the higher audio/video performance potential and increased system flexibility and capabilities of going with a component home theater receiver and a matching surround sound speaker system, doing it “old school” is probably the best route to take. Heck, even if you would like to set up your two rear surround effects speakers “wirelessly”, you can purchase an optional wireless transmitter and receiver kit for a couple hundred bucks that will solve that problem for you.
Besides more amplifier power and better audio/video performance, the major advantage to going with a receiver and speaker system versus an all-in-one “wireless” system is that the receiver is the main hub of your entire system instead of the TV. All of the advanced surround sound audio decoding (and video upscaling) is left up to the receiver. Each of your A/V source inputs will be connected directly to the appropriate input on the back of the receiver. System tweaking and control, as well as all input switching will be done with the receiver’s remote instead of a television remote.
Matched home theater speaker systems that are designed and engineered by the manufacturer to be marketed and sold on their own merits, for use with virtually any decent surround sound receiver on the market, offer home theater enthusiasts the maximum bang for the buck.
Years into the future, you can simply upgrade to the latest and greatest surround sound receiver at that time (and do whatever you want with this one), and keep using this same speaker system you’ve already got, perhaps adding another speaker pair or two, or a second subwoofer, if and when you decide that you want to experience more surround sound channels.
Speaker wire, subwoofer cable, and any HDMI and other audio/video cables needed to connect your source components to the back of the receiver, and the HDMI cable to run to the ARC/eARC input on your television are sold separately.