In a unique twist of fate, my wife is kind of pushing me to get a 5.1 surround sound setup. We live in a townhouse and share a wall with our neighbors on both sides of our unit so I'm not really looking for a loud system, just one that provides nice surround effects at low volumes.

I was hoping to spend around $300 for a speaker set. I was in a Best Buy over the weekend and saw the Sony SAV-E325 for about $279. I'm an idiot when it comes to specifications and such and am not sure about the quality of the set and I was hoping that someone could tell me if this particular set may fit my needs or if there is a better set out there for the money.

Any help would be appreciated.

For $300, I would opt for the JBL NSP1. It consists of 4 JBL N24 speakers and a N Center. You'd have to spend several hundred dollars more to top this package.

You will find this set much cheaper online than at your local store, but it should be a signifigant improvement over the Sony set.

Check our site for a review of the N24s.

I was in Best Buy the other day and Yamaha makes some decent HT speakers. They have several different sets, but the ones I thought souned the best were 5 amost oval-shaped speakers, and they were all identical in size and shape. I think the package included a sub. Definitely go and listen for yourself, whichever speakers you decide on.

Also check out the Cervin Vega speakers at Best Buy, stay away from Bose, KLH.

Consumer Reports magazine just released an article on smaller speakers (rated about thirty different sets) with prices. Might be a good place to get some input.

Steve

If you take a look at HomeTheaterForum, there is a pretty lengthy thread on this. Pretty much the consensus was that consumer reports probably isn't the best place to go with recommendations for certain things, especially for something as subjective as audio equipment. I've found that true as well. It's not just audio-phile snobbiness. Their testing procedure sometimes is quite arbitrary and their conclusions seemed way off, compared with real life results. For toasters and microwaves, CR is probably fine. But for example, if I were to buy a car, I'd rather trust a review from say MotorTrend or Car and Driver than Consumer Reports. If I wanted to buy some running shoes, I'd trust the opinion of Runner's World over CR.

So what to do? You might want to post your question in HTF to get some input from there. They'd tell you to go to AudioReview.com (which is also somewhat arbitrary) to look at some posts, as well as make several recommendations after you've narrowed your choices down some.