I don’t get a whole lot of opportunity to go hands on with home theater systems, and this is a shame because they are directly responsible for most of a home theater.  Let’s face it–no matter how great the picture looks, you just can’t feel it the same way without the booming bass and the sound coming from the correct perspective.  Today I get a shot to fix that with the Samsung HWC770BSXAA.

The Samsung HWC770BSXAA is an eight hundred and forty watt 7.1 channel (seven speakers and a subwoofer) surround sound system with Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD surround sound decoders. It offers multiroom capability, letting you put speaker outputs in other sections of your house, the Crystal Amplifier Pro system to improve sound quality, auto sound calibration and smart volume, an iPod dock, four HDMI inputs and an HDMI output.

I loved dealing with the Samsung HWC770BSXAA for a variety of reasons: the sound was terrific, the controls were simple to work with, and that receiver is going to be a terrific hub for your newer components.  Of course, if you’ve got a lot of older gear this isn’t going to be terribly helpful since it has neither component nor composite inputs.

And the price is a bit on the high side at five hundred and fifty dollars, but you can rest assured that, should you go this route, you WILL get your money’s worth in terms of sound quality and receiver value, but going this way will likely cost you more–quite a bit more–than the cost of entry for just the system alone.