Our first pair of Sierra LX speakers arrived late yesterday afternoon. I haven't had a lot of listening time yet but so far, I'm very impressed. The imaging is great and the amount of bass from such a small speaker is surprising (even having read the reviews). Somehow I adopted this tradition of playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor as my first track on new equipment and it didn't disappoint. The deep notes don't hit like a subwoofer would, of course, but it was still very satisfying.

On more delicate music, they were a delight to listen to. I think we're going to be very happy!

Right now, we're running in a 3.0 system. The Sony A90J television's speaker can be used as a center. I need to do some A/B testing between it and a phantom center to see if it's acceptable or not (though the first impression in that role was not horrible). Anyway, I ran the DTS:X Object Emulator demo and I was surprised at how well the speaker virtualizer did. I was clearly hearing objects move behind me even though there were only three front speakers. Height virtualization was not nearly as successful but surround virtualization worked surprisingly well. It wasn't 100% successful, especially if I moved my head but the LX's must have been doing a good imaging job for the phasing tricks to work so well. The first time I heard it I wasn't expecting much, but it worked so well I made me look over my shoulder for a speaker I knew wasn't there!

I'm looking forward to spending some time over the weekend really doing some quality listening. I'm pretty sure we'll be ordering four more for the surrounds soon! And, then a decision will need to be made about how we're going to handle the center channel.