Hi, I'm not an experienced guy and I'd like to ak a questio: I have a Sony 65" TV with a 5.1 system from Bose. They are 10-15 years old speakers with the 2 satellites + 1 central speaker and 2 rear speakers. All driven by the Onkyo TX-NR545 amplifier (much more recent). If I had to add a DAC like Focusrite Scarlett 2I2 2Nd Generation
would the audio gain quality? I don't watch TV programs but only my dicumentaries with the narrative voice on. I make video editing.
Thanks again for your welcome info.
Hi
@Adriano
I'd like to give you some frank advice, but it mmay come off sounding too harsh. So first I'd like to say that if your setup sounds great to you, then it is great, I'm not trying to trivialize it.
Having said that...
What you have currently is not better than a home theater in a box.
The subwoofer, receiver, and especially the speakers are all relatively sub par when it comes to what you can get nowadays.
They are right that a dac is probably not going to make much of a difference in your setup.
So your real issue is two things when it comes to ugprading.
1. You are using a multichannel setup.
2. Your budget is a $100.
Combine the two and that means you really can't get anything even close to your budget to be a worthwile upgrade in my opinion.
I early on made the mistake of trying incremental upgrades - putting a $100, $200 bucks here and there. And over the years the sound quality barely improved. But the truth is that I should have saved up and made big significant purchases. When I finally did the sound quality jumped way over anything I had before. And it ended up costing me less than all the money I spent over the years trying to nudge the quality upwards. Ten years later, I'm still using the most of the same setup having saved tons of money wallowing in small upgrades.
So the first problem with a multichannel setup is:
Instead of splitting your money two ways for a two channel setup, you have to split your money eight ways!! And that's jsut for the speakers and subwoofers. Upgrading the elecrtonics will also at this level tend to be about 50% of your speaker budget.
What I did is that I invested in tower speakers and robust amplification. I found that their bass easily out did the muddy bass found on cheaper small subwoofers.
So at this point I would discourage you from ugprading.
But if you wanted to... two cheap ways - both ONLY two channel.
Active:
Get a set of mmonitors. A used pair of airmotiv 5 would be my reccomendations. They will out do both your satellites and your subwoofer and fill your room with some sound. Cost $500. If it's not sold out already Emotiva has a deal on some discontinued (new) airmotiv 5 for $279 but it looks like it's going fast. Use your current receiver's pre-outs into them, you may need some cheap adapters.
Passive:
Emotiva T zero speakers ($400)
Emotiva bas-x a-300.
Use your receivers pre-outs . You could also see if your ***receivers could power it*** without the A-300 to shave off $400....but you may get less than satisfactory results.
Total cost $850
***Though your receiver still probably has some okay power it is on the low side. In their advertising they advertise 100 watts per channel with only one channel driven at a high distortion level (1%). The company refuses to show what it can do in stereo. I did some digging and it can only do 20 watts per channel if all 7 channels are driven at high distortion.
So there ya go. It's a lot more than $100. What you need is a total system overhaul for a GOOD upgrade imo and unfortunately that's more than your current budget.
What can I buy?
