Hello Ascend Folks,

I've been upgrading and rearranging my living room home theater setup and I think it's finally time to upgrade my cmt-340se LCR. They've served me well, but clearly a lot has changed since 2006. That said, I've done a lot of reading, learning, and overanalyzing of every mention I can find of potential upgrade candidates, and I'm at the point where I'm spinning my wheels and every day a different option sounds like the best one. With that in mind I seek some guidance from the more experienced and better informed here.


Background info:

Goals:

Primary: upgrade HT to 7.1.4 that give more movie theater like experience, increase fun factor, punch, dialogue clarity, sound stage, etc...

Secondary: upgrade music experience as this is my only setup for both music and movies

Parameters:

- Room: 14x20x8, sit 9-10ft, speakers ~7ft apart and 6-8" off the back wall 3 ft from the sides.

- Usage: 80/20 HT to Music, listen to all kinds of music but favoring rock a bit

- Current gear: 5.1 cmt-340se lcr, htm-200 surrounds, rsl 12s sub, Pioneer lx505 and monoprice 7100x amp


Options:

I think I've kind of narrowed down the options to the following (though open to any suggestions):

- do nothing (keep putting a in bad center once in a while to better appreciate what I have)
- cmt-340se2 LCR (the more affordable option, maybe more of a side grade than I'm looking for, not sure?)
- sierra lx, horizon v2 titan/raal (perhaps a more responsible upgrade option)
- sierra lx, elx horizon titan/raal (maybe the sweet spot choice, maybe overkill or diminishing returns, dunno?)
- elx tower titan/raal, elx horizon titan/raal (yolo)


It feels like I'm right at the 50/50 point for raal vs titan after a conversation with Dina and from the recommendations I'd read, so any additional input on that point would be welcome. One of the things that helped spark this journey was my old sub failing. Replacing that with the rsl 12s was a huge improvement. So that's got me wondering what kind of improvement I can get in my LCR. Without having heard any of these options it's hard to know what level one needs to go to in order to get a substantial improvement. So I suppose that's the other major decision point here.

I don't have a lot of experience with other speakers so it's hard to draw comparisons about what I like, but I did recently try to upgrade the center to a three way Monoprice THX-365c thinking I could maybe get away with that and upgrade just the mains for now. That was a mistake. It sounded to me like it was sitting inside of a bucket. To be fair maybe only about 10-20% bucket sound but I was very happy to switch back to my 340se and learned a lesson about trying to skimp on the center.

Thanks to all of you here. I appreciate all the posts and reviews, they've been very helpful and I look forward to your input.


-Chuck