System selector!
Home Cinema Choice|May 2023
Given three similar budgets, Mark Craven, Steve May and John Archer assemble three different AV setups focused on movies, streaming and gaming
System selector!

£3,000 Atmos movie maestro - built by Mark Craven

YOU CAN, THANKS to the proliferation of Dolby Atmos soundbars and TVs with built-in systems, assemble an Atmos audio AV rig for far less than £3,000. But if you want to go down the traditional separates-based route, this sort of price tag seems like a good place to start. And the nature of such a system means it has future upgrade and expansion potential. Swapping one component doesn't mean changing everything else.

It's still a fairly tight budget, however, and with the desire here for fully discrete Atmos audio the TV choice is an area where I've looked to skimp. Not for me a new, 2023-era flagship OLED, as a set like Samsung's QE65S95C (p42) would blow my budget. Instead, I've scaled the size down to 55in and hunted for earlier-generation bargains that are still available, with a pencilled in price tag of around £1,000.

Where to look? Well, there are OLED screen options at this price, some 42in or 48in, which feels like a compromise too far. Interestingly, however, there are OLED TVs that debuted in 2021 still doing the rounds, at prices greatly reduced at launch - both LG's 550LEDC1 and Sony's XR55A80J were selling, at the time of writing, for £899 and £998 respectively, as stock is cleared. However, I haven't looked that far back, instead opting for LG's OLED C2 model, at 55in, for a bargain ticket of £1,099. This generation not only upgrades the panel (to Evo) and processor, but features an entirely more stylish central stand.

Up and at 'em!

This story is from the May 2023 edition of Home Cinema Choice.

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This story is from the May 2023 edition of Home Cinema Choice.

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