Pioneer SP-PK52FS, quality sound at a budget price
Pioneer SP-PK52FS, quality sound at a budget price
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Pioneer SP-PK52FS, quality sound at a budget price

Speakers
Hey, I'm Matthew Mascoviak from CNET and we're gonna take a look at the Pioneer SP-PK52FS. This is a budget home theater speaker system and is currently selling for $630. Now, this is an update to Pioneer's excellent budget speaker system from last year and it's one of the best values you're gonna find in home audio. It's a 5.1 speaker system comprise of 2 tower speakers in the front, a large center channel speaker, 2 bookshelf speakers in the rear and a subwoofer. Like any standard speakers, you're gonna need to pair this up with an AV receiver so as not a fully integrated system like a home theater in a box or a sound bar. A tower speakers feature a removable grille in the front and you can see they feature 3/5 in a quarter-inch woofers plus a 1-inch tweeter on the top. Around back, there are 2 ports so you wanna place this about a foot away from the wall. The center channel is unusually large for a system like this which makes placement a little difficult. It doesn't quite fit under most TVs without blocking the stream so you need to experiment with placement options depending on your home setup. The rear speakers are pretty big as well. So you gonna need a lot of room for this system in general. The subwoofer has an 8-inch down-firing woofer on the bottom, a port on the front and on-board 100 watt amp. All of the speakers feature the same vinyl wood grain finish, which looks descent, but it's not quite as nice as the finish on competing systems at The Energy Take Classic 5.1. The system also only comes in black so it's gonna be a great fit for every décor. What makes this a system so impressive is that sound quality. We had our resident audio files, Steve Guttenberg, listened to the Pioneers and he was blown away finding the sound quality close to our reference [unk] speakers that cost over twice as much. Both music and movies sounded outstanding and the Pioneers relatively compact subwoofer really blended well with the full size tower speakers. If your highest priority is sound quality and you've got a relatively modest budget, these are the speakers you wanna get. So, overall our only reservations about the system is that it's big and the finish isn't gonna fit in every living room. But if you've got the space, this is a phenomenal value and you're getting the best sounding speakers we've heard at this price. I'm Matthew Mascoviak from CNET and this is the Pioneer SP-PK52FS.

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