I was given one of these sets as a graduation gift from my parents. Upon looking at the MSRP of $5,699 ( I believe thats what it said on the box) and hearing that they paid much closer to $300 (Well hey, its because it came out of a white van my dad explained) I was very skeptical about the quality. I was convinced that they had been ripped off. I decided to take the reciever out of the box and test the center speaker. After about twenty minutes I finally got it hooked up "right", well at least so that sound came out. It sounded awful, with the sub making all sorts of bad noises. This was true both for radio stations and for when I hooked up a CD player to it. Not wanting to make my parents depressed, I said that it was great and proceeded to leave it alone for the next week. At the end of the week, a buddy of mine had the oppurtunity to buy the same set of speakers. I offered to let him set up my set at his house to see how it sounded first. After a bit of time and replacement of the speaker wire that came in the box with new 18 gauge speaker wire, we got it going, The sub still sounded bad but after a while it got good, I thnk it needed to run for a while to get broken in. I have to say, that although the speaker wire that comes with the system sucks and needs to be replaced, this is actually a pretty sweet system. We turned it up loud and it sounded great, Clear sound, great bass, much more than my future apartment will need. In talking to two of my friends that were in the room, both of whom have spent a lot of time with speakers, we decided that the money was worth it for the speakers alone. The connections for the wires kind of sucks, but once you get it in good (and use good wire) they actually sound great. As I mentioned before, this is only for the model with the expensive MSRP. I don't have any reason to lie about this as I don't have any of these for sale. I just felt like I needed to write something after reading all of these people bashing the product. I spent a great deal of time on the internet searching for reviews of this and saw nothing but bad things. I'm glad I took the time to set it up before I threw it in the trash. If you're looking for a top end home theatre system, don't buy it out of a white van. But if you're just looking for something to spice up your movies with, I would say that this is a decent investment. I know that mine sounds 10x better than the home theatre system my parents got from walmart for 240 bucks. But hey, for those of you who gamble, good luck, I hope it sounds as good as mine does. Make sure you let the sub run for a while before you really judge it. To those of you who look down on us, well maybe you're right. But I know that I at least am happy with my present.