Denis Fodor responds to what I wrote concerning a DTS surround sound recording of Holsts' Planets from Telarc: >>The performance is very good, as is the sound, but the surround sound >>engineering is nearly ideal. > >To get the benefit of this, how large a space is required? Is special >preparation of surfaces needed? About how much would a modest, but >efficacious system cost? Excellent questions, and with respect to the first two, entire books have been written. Room size and acoustic response are very important, especially to the sound of classical music recordings, whether trying to reproduce the intimacy of a chamber music recital or a full orchestra in a large hall. To be truthful, I haven't thought much about this, and I haven't read anything at all about it, but I tend to think that the more speakers you have, the less you need to worry about room acoustics. In modern digital surround processing, effects such as hall ambience are created all around you. You don't have to hope that the sound emanating from the front will bounce around your room correctly and give a feeling of depth. For many discrete, multi-channel recordings, the sound coming from the surround speakers mostly or completely overwhelms the reflected sound coming from those positions. In other words, it seems reasonable to say that to some degree surround sound overwhelms your room acoustics. My room is an incredibly complex shape. It's narrow in the direction I sit facing the front speakers, and wide to the left opening to a dining room. The dining room and listening room share a 18' vaulted ceiling that follows all the way upstairs into the master bedroom. There is no wall directly behind the listening position, but there is a partial wall to the left. To the right is a wall at an angled wall and the front double doors. There's lots of glass and bare, acoustically untreated (though textured) drywall. I sit off center from the two front speakers, as I have to share this system as a home theater. My center channel is up too high. Get the picture? Even if you can't visualize what my room looks like from my lousy description, I think I made the point that this is anything but a rectangular box. You might also have restrictions on where surround speakers might go. My speaker arrangement isn't even close to the ideal. I lived here for two years with my system set up as a regular stereo. Though I could get a reasonably good soundstage up front, the room reverberations were all over the place. One of the things I noticed when I went to a surround sound system was that the room mostly disappeared. Once I went through the calibration setups, adjusting for distance and volume on each speaker, the recording dominated. The image was solid, and I could sense the ambience the engineer intended, even on stereo recordings using matrixed sound. My general feeling is that a small room is not a problem. I have heard some excellent home thearters in small rooms. As to price, it depends on what you have, and what you want (I'll let Denis do the conversions to Deutsche Marks). As this market has exploded over the past two years, there are some incredibly low-priced components out there that perform very well. You can get a five- or six-channel A/V receiver in the $500-1000 range, or perhaps a little less. There are many good receivers in this price range from Harmon Kardon, Onkyo, Denon, Sony, the list goes on, but one of the best buys for the budget conscious may be the Model 1050 from Outlaw (www.outlawaudio.com). There are some amazing 5.1 speaker systems available that are in the $700-1500 range, such as the HC6 system from Acoustic Research (yes, that AR, www.acoustic-research.com) that lists for a measly $799. Her's a good review: http://www.hometheatersound.com/equipment/acousticresearch_hc6.htm Then you add a quality DVD player, or combination DVD-Audio/DVD-Video player, which will run about $400-600, perhaps a little less (there are some good DVD-Video players out there that list for $250, such as the new Sony model). Of course, in each category, including the player, you could also spend five figures. Add another $100-200 for quality cables, and you're pretty much set. So, for as little as $1600 (or less if you are into haggling) you could have a complete system that would be quite respectable. I recommend hooking up with someone locally who can give you advice that can be tailored to your needs. There are some tricky aspects, but nothing too intimidating. Make sure that whatever you buy you can return if it doesn't sound good in your room. The magazines I mentioned previously are all great sources of information, and some even have reviews of complete systems that might be just the thing. The links to those sources are: http://www.stereophile.com/ http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/ http://www.theperfectvision.com/ Dave [log in to unmask] http://www.classical.net/