Went to Sam's Club in Logan UT last week.
I kept hearing what sounded like good sound, an orchestra piece, down at the end of one aisle. The sound was hard to ignore while I looked at something else further up the aisle. Then I finally made it down to the display, Sumsung 5.1 DVD/amp/speakers, setup on a color point-of-purchase panel, w/ text highlighting the features. There were 5 super-compact satellite speakers, 4 corners were identical then the requisite wider center speaker; sattelites were all arranged within about an 18" square, the 3 front speakers across & above the 2 rear speakers next to each other below; the sub (don't know if it was powered or passive) off to the right nearby. The single DVD/control/amp box was very slim & small. I think the text said 1000W; who knows what that means.
But the sound was phenomenally good; an approximately 2 minute long orchestral passage kept cyling, possibly made just to display the sound potential of the system, very natural, very pleasant. Have no idea what was the form of the software. This is embarrasing, but I thought to myself if I had to I could live w/ this little system. The sub (side-firing approximately 8" w/ a huge front-firing port) was clean, w/ little if any mid-bass hump, & went lower than any reasonable person would expect (huge warehouse so no resonances, but also power-demanding for the orchestral peak). You gotta recommend this thing to normal people shopping now. It seemed to sound far more pleasant & natural than the $1000 msrp NAD 5.1 DVD/receiver + $200 Rocket speaker pair I heard, though that system wasn't broken in.
Price was somewhere between $200 & $249, I think much closer to $200. It's absolutely nuts how good it was for the cost. Ultra high value.
For 2008, Hyundai, maker of some of the better-built cars now, is targeting a V8-powered S-Class fighter for about the price of a C-Class. It's good for the small botique/internet high-end manufacturers that the market is too small to interest the huge Korean/Chinese conglomerates.
