5.1 Channel Home Theater Satellite Speakers And Subwoofer - Black

A lengthy review follows so for the TL;DR version: Great budget speakers for a small living room or bedroom once burned in and are vastly superior to HDTV speakers or a soundbar. Highly recommend if you don't have the money for a $300 range set of speakers or just want to get your toe wet in surround sound setups. Updated February 25, 2017: Still a good bargain. Having since upgraded the living room surround sound speakers, I've moved these to my PC along with a cheap used 5.1 receiver but with a different subwoofer. They work very well in a "near field" environment of desktop and three feet away especially in gaming. More details at the end of the review. Updated 1/29/2016 Long version: When it finally became unavoidable that I'd have to retire my lashed up 5.1 system consisting of a Creative Labs Dolby and DTS decoder and Gateway BA-7900 speakers, I had to get some surround speakers fast and cheap. Reviews of the 108427 were good enough, the price was right, Prime shipping was fast, so I pulled the trigger. First it is important to relay what kind of taste I have in speakers. Long a fan of Boston Acoustics line of musically neutral products, I value detail and fidelity over shaking the foundation of the house. Yamaha and Polk follow, while I despise Bose and Klipsch for distorting audio. More like torturing it, but that's my personal opinion and audio preferences are very personal. Genres of music listened to are rock, classical, jazz, Sinatra, Dino, electronica, soundtracks, outlaw... pretty much everything other than rap and country. Constantly shifting between music types is why I prefer neutral speakers over "warm" sounding ones. The good news is these cheap Monoprice speakers are very neutral and well detailed for their price point. Better speakers can be had for 2-3 times the price including their own line. After 35 hours of burn in (a must with small speakers), the high frequencies are good, mid-range are good for movies (music is another matter), lows are shockingly good thanks to a subwoofer designed to carry a lot of the load the satellites normally would. If you are going to play a lot of music over these, you will want to either replace the fronts with bookshelf speakers or matrix everything with Dolby ProLogic II or DTS: Neo 6. While not faithful in those modes, they cover up the weaknesses that show in stereo mode. A drawback is the fussy connectors on the speakers. In fact I was sure one of the satellites was defective out of the box. Further examination revealed that some of the strands in the speaker wire had not made it through the hole in the spring loaded connector. It only took five or six strands splayed out to cause the speaker to hiss. Ten minutes of fiddling and muttering under my breath produced clean sound once all the strands were in. Connecting the active subwoofer to a receiver that has a single RCA line out does not require an adaptor. Just take the stereo RCA cord included and plug in only the white jack to to the line out and the white line in jack. Works just fine since it is a mono signal in the first places, though I found on my set that more bass was delivered through the white line in than the red. It may be designed that way like more expensive subs. 8/19/2017 I was wrong about the subwoofer only needing one RCA jack to work effectively. Taking a peek into the enclosure, it became obvious from the wiring that the 8" driver is a dual voice coil at 8 ohms each. This means you NEED a mono to stereo adaptor to get the full sound if you go off a receiver's subwoofer out jack. Otherwise the driver only moves half the air it should! Another review complained the speakers are very directional and I found this to be true. The design of the cabinets is that the drivers sit behind a shallow horn for both the tweeters and midwoofers which limits their off axis performance. While terrible for music, this is an actual plus for movies that have dedicated surround sound mixes or for gaming. Blu-rays of were used to test different surround mixes: TRON: Legacy was used to test DTS-HD 5.1, The Hunt for Red October for Dolby TrueHD, and The Conversation in DTS-HD 5.1. The first two I played to gauge the effectiveness of surround cues with the last movie used to hear how a dialogue heavy movie would fare. Directional cues are excellent making it a joy to listen to modern movies. The torpedoes in Red October zoomed around nicely with the tweeters really adding to the ambiance inside the submarines. The center seems a trifle weak, but it isn't a dramatic imbalance and can be adjusted at the receiver level. The sub is ridiculously good for a cheap 8", managing to be detailed and still able to make your ribcage vibrate when LFE is used in a scene like the dance club in TRON: Legacy. Just don't expect much lower than 40 Hz Though small, the Monoprice 108247 speakers need some oomph to push them. They really don't perform until they start getting loud. For reference, the speakers are hooked up to my Sony STR-DN1010 receiver that is rated to 110 watts per channel. Music doesn't fill out until above 40 volume, while movies and TV require at least 35. Yes, they can get loud as long as you have a decent enough receiver to drive them. Remember to calibrate the speakers with your receiver if you can and make sure the crossover is set to 160 Hz. Part of my putting together the new surround setup involved assistance from two three month old kittens. As a result, I can report that the speakers are fairly tough units able to survive a 3 foot drop with only the grill popping off. Of course, I don't advise trying this at home, kids. Love the movie performance, but playing music over them left much to be desired. Consequently, a pair of Insignia NS-SP213 bookshelf speakers have replaced the fronts. Currently they are burning in and I forgot to get the banana jacks to turn the setup from 5.1 to 7.1, so I'll update this review later with the results of that. 1/29/2016: While I still haven't gotten the 7.1 up and running, the NS-SP213 speakers up front blended in much better than expected with the 8427 set. Stereo music is very enjoyable now with the subwoofer perfectly overcoming the low end weakness of the new fronts. Though auto calibrated by the Sony receiver again, the center volume had to be manually bumped up a couple of decibels to overcome it being drowned out in the mix. In fact, I'm wondering if the calibration is what made the center seem weaker in the first place. To anyone interested in playing music over these speakers, I highly recommend adding a pair of bookshelf speakers to the mix. Also did some testing with and without the metal grills and found little discernible difference with the 80247 satellites, unlike the Insignia pair which need to have the grills off. February 25, 2017 Two of the satellites and the center now are being used with my PC via an old Sony 5.1 receiver. The directionality mentioned earlier is terrific for playing video games that use proper surround cues -- there's no sneaking up on me now! The subwoofer is also in service, but in the home gym/hobby room filling in the void for some deep bass deficient stereo speakers. Being able to wire the hot stereo outs to the speakers is a nice plus on such a bargain unit. I've also taken apart the remaining unused satellites to get a look at construction and was surprised at what I found. Though finding a capacitor bridging the woofer to tweeter wasn't a shock (it prevents lower sound frequencies from frying the tweeter), the polyfill mat to dampen sound was. The back of the plastic cabinet also seems to have been designed with the option to put a full crossover in! Build quality is better than expected for something this low priced leading to some mad scientist experiments on the spares.

A little story: A very nice set! My previous set was an RCA box set of receiver with 5.1 speakers purchased in the 90s. Speakers still work to this day but the receiver is starting to die. I purchased a Sony STR-DH750 with 7.2 capabilities to bring the speakers to life, but realized that my old subwoofer was powered by my old receiver. Rather than invest in an amp for 20-year-old speakers decided to invest in a new system. After extensive research, reading many reviews, feedback and ratings, I decided that Monoprice was the best bang for the buck. It was between the 108247 and this set, the 10565. While I'm a cheapo who tries to get the best for as little as possible, I made the decision that spending nearly double for the next step up was best, especially after the lroce dropped 40 bucks! The one downside to this transaction that it was backordered. What was to be a month's wait ended up being 10 weeks or so. I wasn't in a rush, amazon wasn't pulling my leg and even asked if I wanted to cancel my order, but I was hoping that the speakers would be worth the wait- especially since I wasn't yet finished making my entertainment center (that's a discussion for yet another forum). Shipment I finally received a ship date, and it arrived 3 days earlier! I was a bit disappointed because the box had visible damage. I took pictures to document it. Upon unboxing, it was only the outer box that had damage- fault of the carrier, not amazon or Monoprice. In fact, kudos to them because that outer box was essential protection! Unboxing The speakers have a nice, sleek, modern feel to them. Nothing extravagant, clear simple design; less is more, in my book. The sub is slightly bigger than what I thought; a little taller than expected due to the small legs. Setup I've hooked up several systems before, so as a man, decided not look at the directions. I do love the wire attachements on the back! Very simple: push, insert wire, release! No screwing or turning like the back of my receiver. Indeed, no mounting holes, just the speaker which is perfect for my setup as I have them sitting on wall-mounted shelves and a mantle around the tv. Setup took about an hour because I tried using old, used wire and realized I didn't have enough so had to use a new spool so that all the wires would look the same. Otherwise, should have taken 15 minutes or so. I added an old pair of bose dual cubes to these speakers and set them up for rear surround. The set does come with red/white combo RCA cable. Many reviewers have problems with this not working on their receiver so had to order an adapter or different cable. Both the sub and my receiver have stereo inputs so this worked perfect. I use the included the mic and run the auto setup. Piece of cake. However, afterpowering up my ps3, my screen would flicker every few seconds. I swapped out the included RCA cable to use a heavier duty set I picked up from RadioShack a few years ago. The flickering stopped! I pop in Iron Man on bluray to give the speakers a run. The surround worked beautifully! Bullets wizzing by startled my two cats. Yet... no real boom. I felt like the bass was missing. I unplug the front speakers and put my ear to the sub, and notice nothing. Is the sub THAT bad?? I hook up the receiver to my phone via Bluetooth and play a 10 minute video of the THX intro. Nothing impressive. I look at the back and crank the bass all the way up. Still nothing. I google my problem and find a small suggestion. I dive into the receiver's on-screen speaker setup to go to Speaker Configuration which was set to "3/4". No idea what that fraction stands for. The online diagnosis said to ensure the configuration number ended in ".1". So I scrolled through the setup options and 3/4.1 was an option, so I selected it. BOOOOOOOOOOOOM! A deep, heavy, bass sweeped across the house, rattled some wood shelving, sent my cats running and scared the crap out of my dog. Yup. Subwoofer works. Perhaps a little too well. After several movies, I finally adjusted the bass to my liking. It is VERY powerful, perhaps a bit too much. Even my neighbor thinks so. Conclusion: An easy setup that may require some fiddling and fine-tuning. The subwoofer may take some fenangling, but it is definitely worth it. If you're the kind of person to decide to purchase your own set of speakers, you're likely knowledgeable enough to figure all of this out like I was. End of the matter: just buy this, already. Look no further, don't waste your time reading anymore reviews. You won't be disappointed. These ARE the speakers you're looking for.

These are a great inexpensive set of speakers - I was more interested in their bigger brother, but Monoprice doesn't sell them through Amazon.ca just yet and their final cost otherwise would have ended up being more than $300. I don't even want to say that for the price these ones sound great, because they put out some deceptively great sound. The build quality is more than decent and extras like wall mounts are a nice touch. I bought some banana plugs to use with my amp but the pin type plugs you can get probably would not work with these speakers unless you're wall or stand mounting them (as there is no clearance underneath if placed directly on a flat surface). I also don't fully understand the situation where someone would need a left and right connection to a subwoofer, so I simply have my single subwoofer out on my amp running to the right input on the sub and it seems to work fine. I may replace it with a Y connector eventually. My only complaint is minor, and that's with the subwoofer - it puts out an audible hum when there's no sound. It seems to be linked when switching inputs with the amp, but thankfully it's not a constant thing (thankfully!). The auto on feature works well and while it won't fill a big room it's got a decent punch to it.

Mi Monoprice 10565 Premium lo acompaño con Sony STRDN1080 y la calidad del sonido es increíble OMG! XD

How time flies! I bought this surround system 5 years ago! And its still going strong. The centre of my system is now a relatively old Marantz AV Surround Receiver NR1403 and a 60” Samsung 8000 series 60 inch LED 3D TV. The Monoprice sound surround system exceeded my expectations. After 5 years the sound is excellent it just seems to get better all the time. They said the speakers required a break in period. To my ears the system sounds full and smooth. The speakers combined with the Marantz sound stage creates better than average sound compared to other systems I’ve had in the past. I have not had any issues with the system and I like the idea that the subwoofer only activates when necessary. In addition to using the system for the TV, I listen to both my large collection of CDs and streaming sources through this system and all sound very good, which isn’t the case with some sound surround systems. The finish is plain and unadorned, which I like. Simple black cube shapes for the satellite speakers and the subwoofer provides nice smooth bass with adjustable crossover and has a relatively small footprint. The system is hard wired not wireless, so some wiring is required. I installed the wiring for the rear speakers along the bottom of the baseboard and its pretty well invisible if one isn’t looking for it. At the time I bought this system a CNET review compared the Monoprice system positively to the similar Energy Take Classic 5.1 system which cost much more saying it sounded better. There was some speculation at the time that the Monoprice system was reversed engineered from the Energy system. Whether that was the case or not I don’t know, I just know they do sound great. I would recommend this system to anyone looking for a reasonably priced 5. 1 system that performs well without having to break the bank.

Es necesario tener un amplificador para poderlas conectar, tienen una muy buena calidad de sonido, el woofer responde excelente y el precio es muy accesible.

It's a wonderful product,