1st Time Home Cinema Setup

paulpud

As part of a lounge extension and refurb I want to install a new home cinema setup, looking at a cheap separates system.

My budget for the amp and speakers is about £400-ish and at the moment I am considering an Onkyo TX-SR308 at around £200 and a Jamo A102 HCS 5.1 speaker package at around £190.

I'm not after anything particularly special, just something that will make a new TV and Blu-ray sound half decent.

Is my considered choice a reasonable one or can I do any better for around the same budget?

Knarf44

As a budget setup I think you've made good choices but if it was me I'd want to audition the Jamo speakers against the Onkyo SKSHT528 ones as they might be a better match for the Onkyo amp you've chosen. I assume you're shopping in Richer Sounds in which case contact them and ask for a date/time for a demo.

Take along a DVD or two that you are very familiar with as something to listen to so you can make a judgement on which speakers you think are best.

trets77

i have a Onkyo Amp , they are a good piece of kit .

you can get some good speaker cable and interconnects for silly prices on ebay .

aliEnRIK

Id go for the Tannoy speaker package and the Sony STRDH800 (If you can, which you probably cant) from Richer Sounds

Hammyman

I have the Onkyo SR308. It replaced a 12 year old Panasonic AV amp which didn't support Dolby TrueHD so I ended up with 2.1 on Blu-Ray movies. The Panasonic Amps RRP alone was over £500 when I bought it. With the speaker set it came with, it topped £800!

The SR308 is connected to the same Panasonic speakers and bass cab that the old AV amp was. It sounds every bit as good. It has excellent connectivity and you can opt to have for example video supplied by HDMI but the audio from the same source by optical. Its a very flexible system. Everything can be renamed, HDMI inputs linked to optical inputs - all in all a nice system. In the packaging, they've even supplied sticky labels for your speaker cables so you can label Front Left, Front Right etc etc making removing and replacing them less of a headache and no needing to resort to masking tape

If there's one downside, it is that the Onkyo remote only works Onkyo DVD/BR players and TVs.