rear surrounds, how important?

[pmwoodward]

Hello,

I am interested in others thoughts on how important it is to have rear surrounds of high quality. In the past, I went from CSW's lowest level to their highest quality (at the time) rear surrounds. The differance in the overall presentation was minimal. I am in the process of setting up a dedicated HT room and will soon be adding better rear surrounds. I notice some systems have all 5 speakers the same model. On a side note, it also seems rather foolish for HT amps to have all channels rated at the same power. Assuming the same speakers are being used, I would doubt it if the rear surround speakers used 30% of the power of the front R/L. The center obviously uses quite a bit.

thanks for your input,
Paul

[Kingrsl]

I'm no expert on the matter but from what I've read, the rear surrounds don't get much of a workout in your average movie. At least not to the point where you would need to worry about how much power they could handle. Now if you are using your setup often for 5.1 (or more) music playback, then perhaps you should pay closer attention to your selection.

Just my 2 cents. ;)

[dafeist]

In general, your rear surrounds have a lower sensitivity than their matched partners up front so need more power to make them equally loud. Also, as far as wattage goes, during movies, your speakers are usually using only a couple of watts unless the scene is huge with explosions or loud high-freq noises (swords clanking, etc) and these scenes are often the ones that employ your rear surrounds. So at these times, they will need power to be heard given their lower sensitivity. Also, as far as quality of surrounds and/or matching brands, I think chincing on quality isnt the way to go. They should be as good as your fronts. As far as matching brands (tonal quality essentially), its not nearly as important going from front to back as it is going left to right. So the fronts and center should match and the rear surrounds should match.