Someone posted a 2.1 setup asking what to change next. B&W CM7 fronts, an Audio Pro sub, a 65 inch Samsung from 2019, an Xbox One X and a PS3 feeding it. The receiver is a Yamaha RX-V420.
The speakers are not the problem. CM7s are a proper pair of towers and they will still be in that room in ten years. The receiver is the problem, and specifically what it can accept over HDMI. That model is old enough that I do not believe HDMI is on the back of it at all, so before anything else I would confirm how the Xbox is actually connected today. If the answer is optical out of the TV, then everything the Xbox can send is being folded down to two channels or lossy 5.1 before it reaches those towers, and no speaker purchase fixes that.
Replacing the receiver buys three things at once. HDMI switching so the TV stops being the bottleneck, room correction, and the option to add a centre and surrounds later without redoing the whole thing. Anything current with enough channels does the job. I would not stretch the budget for height channel features that room cannot use yet.
Second thing, and it costs almost nothing: measure the sub. One small sub in a corner with no correction is usually the loudest wrong thing in a 2.1 system, and it is often what people mistake for a speaker problem.
The PS3 I would leave exactly where it is. It plays discs, it works, and it is the only box in that list not holding something back.
What does the room look like? Is a centre channel even possible, or is the TV on a stand with nothing under it?
The speakers are not the problem. CM7s are a proper pair of towers and they will still be in that room in ten years. The receiver is the problem, and specifically what it can accept over HDMI. That model is old enough that I do not believe HDMI is on the back of it at all, so before anything else I would confirm how the Xbox is actually connected today. If the answer is optical out of the TV, then everything the Xbox can send is being folded down to two channels or lossy 5.1 before it reaches those towers, and no speaker purchase fixes that.
Replacing the receiver buys three things at once. HDMI switching so the TV stops being the bottleneck, room correction, and the option to add a centre and surrounds later without redoing the whole thing. Anything current with enough channels does the job. I would not stretch the budget for height channel features that room cannot use yet.
Second thing, and it costs almost nothing: measure the sub. One small sub in a corner with no correction is usually the loudest wrong thing in a 2.1 system, and it is often what people mistake for a speaker problem.
The PS3 I would leave exactly where it is. It plays discs, it works, and it is the only box in that list not holding something back.
What does the room look like? Is a centre channel even possible, or is the TV on a stand with nothing under it?
