This Holiday Season, I decided to give myself the gift of Surround Sound. I had the following requirements for my system: Inexpensive, as I didn't want to spend over $1000 on a total package, and I wanted to ideally keep it around $500; Small Speakers, as my wife was concerned about the look of the system, especially the rear satellites; Universal wiring, as I had run two channels of 16 Gauge wiring through the walls for my rear channels; Great Sound for the Money, as I wanted to really get as good as I could afford while staying in budget.

After doing my research and talking to some coworkers, I decided upon picking up these JBL Speakers, and matching them with a Yamaha HTR-5930 A/V Receiver. The Yamaha was rated for a max output of 110W per channel (at 1kHz, realistically 80W at 20Hz-20kHz), and these speakers could handle 100W per channel. The speakers were small, to satisfy my wife, but had titanium tweeters for sharper highs than silk tweeters. The Sub has a larger diameter speaker than most budget Subwoofers, for more powerful lows. Finally, everything was silver, which matched the rest of my entertainment setup, and again, would keep the wife happy.

Setup was a breeze. I had spent the night before drilling the walls and sub flooring to pull wires for the rear channels. On installation, all I had to do was cut some more speaker cable, clip it into place, and attach the speakers to their stands and on top of my 42" DLP TV. The Subwoofer is separately powered, with a nice "auto on" feature that puts it in standby when there's no signal, and I plugged in the "RCA Style" Subwoofer line from the receiver to that.

The first thing I checked out was Star Wars Episode III, and I sat in awe for the ten minute long opening space battle. The entire room rumbled as the giant cruisers swept by, and suddenly Anikin's fighter screamed in from behind me onto the screen. It was awesome! Switching to some music, and then video games, I was very satisfied with the quality of these speakers. I still haven't cranked them to full volume, but I notice that with the separate channels, I don't need to turn the system up that loudly for good quality sound. Our main floor is an open floor plan, and now when my wife runs the dishwasher, I can kick the audio up just a few dB and be able to clearly understand dialog while still hearing all the sound effects and music in whatever I'm watching. With the speakers in my television set, I occasionally had to strain when there was background noise.

The only negative about these speakers is that I did not buy the matched JBL stands for the satellites, and thus none of the universal mounting options on the stands I did buy worked. I wound up using double sided tape, which did not stick very securely because the bottoms of the speakers are not flat, and there are no screw holes in the speaker bottoms. Luckily, the Satellites are very light, so I'm not overly concerned. I'll probably wind up jury rigging a better solution at some point, but this is a minor issue as I'm still somewhat worried about the stability of these speakers.

Overall, I think these speakers are great sounding at a great price, and I would recommend their purchase.