I built an incredibly satisfying music and theater system for about $6500 thanks to GoldenEar.

Equipment:
- Triton 2, Supersat 3 surrounds and Supersat 50C center
- Marantz SR5007 Receiver (with Audioquest NRG-X3 power cable and Vibrapod isolation feet)
- Kimber Cables
- Emotiva CMX-6 AC line filter
- Acoustic panels by MSR Acoustics
- "Get Better Sound" DVD by Jim Smith

Room Setup:

Since the Triton 2's are not power hungry, I was able to invest more money into room acoustics and power conditioning. Money well spent if you ask me, but different rooms and setups may have different needs. After breaking them in, I started to play around with speaker placement. This is where the Jim Smith DVD is invaluable. By using a laser measuring device, I was able to precisely place these speakers in relation to my listening seat and also get identical toe-in. Your dealer may have different techniques to setup the speakers, but it is worth the 100$ investment to have them use a laser and get the extra precision. The imaging will leave you speechless. (I didn't get dealer installation because I live in Oklahoma and the nearest dealer is in Dallas.)

My setup ended up looking like this:
Speakers 8 feet apart (3 feet from the front wall)
Listening seat 10 feet from speakers, (2 feet from back wall)
Wide toe-in (tweeters angled to intersect about 2 feet behind my head)

For the surrounds, the Dynex speaker mounts at Best Buy didn't work for me. The mounting plate in this kit was designed to be used with two threaded inserts. However, the speaker mounting kit sold by Home Depot worked just fine (can't remember who makes it).

The Fun Stuff

Forget about spending hours tweaking crossovers and DSP. These speakers have clean and agile bass right out of the box. I used the Nordost calbration CD, which plays a sweeping frequency that matches up to the seconds on the track. So at 50 seconds you are hearing 50 Hz. This track easily exposes room nodes. Before doing any Audyssey correction, I went through the track and compared performance to the single sub I had been using in my old system. The usual room nodes were much less pronounced, and some of them were completely gone. Thanks to Sandy and his crew for doing all the hard work on getting those crossovers perfect. Would much rather leave that to the pros!

The midrange is exactly as it should be. Movie dialogue sounds natural (no congestion). Saxophones sound full and not overly breathy. Pianos sound seamless. Glad I had the house to myself for a weekend, because these babies kept me in a trance. I didn't want to turn the music off even for a second to swap cables. I just wanted to sit and enjoy for hours.

Compressed, standard lossless, and high resolution music all sounded great. For 24/96 music, I use HomeSharing and pass the digital signal out of my iPad2 to my receiver's USB port. Bit perfect music streamed from my computer in the other room. Gotta love that. For movies, I change the subwoofer level from 11 to 12 o'clock for a little extra punch. Nice to have that flexibility without too much hassle.

Couldn't be happier with this setup. Instead of years of tweaking and frustration, I took the easy route. Spend a few days seriously focusing on setup and acoustics, and then sit back and enjoy for years to come. Highly recommended!

Nice write up. Am wondering how wide your room is and how far the Triton II's are from the side walls. Doing the math it looks like theres about fifteen feet from your front to back wall?

Room is 14'8" long but opens up on the right side so that speaker isn't near a sidewall. The left speaker is a little over 4 feet from the sidewall.

My wife did not want a panel on that wall, so we compromised and put a couple of tall plants there. The idea being to break up the first reflections a little bit. Not sure if they are doing much good yet, but as the plants grow leafier we will see. Hah!

Just stumbled across your review.

Thanks as I am contemplating this receiver to go with the cinema 2 , also the 6007

thanks for your review.

I just purchased the Cinema 2 and am considering the Marantz 5007 and your review helps.

you seem to be satisfied with the receiver/speaker combo as it pertains to listening to music and watching movies.

any further thoughts?????