Question on getting started

[azanon]

If you have really cheap Jensen speakers and you then buy Ascends, they will be so far ahead in terms of performance and musical clarity that you would only be doing yourself a disservice to be running them concurrently. If you want to build piece by piece, i'd recommend starting with a pair of cbm-170s and just run stereo on your HT and just use your sub only for the real lows. Again though, the same thing might apply with your sub too - if its also cheap, you might prefer the 170s handling the lows too .

[trekkerj]

I was thinking of running them concurrently, only to sample the center channel quality and the level of improvement, in order to determine if I indeed want to do a full upgrade.

As for the sub, I can't understand how much better an expensive sub would sound. Isn't bass the same (as long as it's not distorted?). It seems pretty deep to me.