I get this question alot, and was wondering if you guys had an answer.

Some people just aren't able to route speaker wire to their rear speakers, and they don't want to deal with the hassle of getting it run behind the walls/ceiling/whatever.

So, are there any decent wireless options?

Personally, I've owned the Rocketfish wireless rear speaker kit for a couple years now, and at best it's...okay. It technically works, but with at least two huge drawbacks: 1) the volume is not adjustable with the A/V receiver, so it's set and you have to change it on the Rocketfish box, which is a huge pain because it's something you want out of site. And 2) it appears the Rocketfish works on the 2.4GHz spectrum, and was killing my WiFi. Not good. So I've unplugged the device and thought I'd just use it for when watching movies, like when friends are over. The result is that it's more work than I'd like so I never use it.

The other option I've thought about recommending to people who ask me this is the speaker bar. Again, I see some problems with these products: 1) they're expensive, 2) I don't know how well they work, and 3) I especially don't know how well they work for oddly-shaped rooms. Does anyone here at least have an answer to the last two issues?

Thanks for the help.

Th only ones I've had experience with are ones where the AV system has wireless speaker functionality built in.

One was an older Logitech set, with wired fronts and 2 rear wireless speakers. It was a higher end gaming solution, and it worked well for the person as they had a good audio out from their system to go into the speakers without too much remote chaos. Problem was similar though with 2.4GHz interference. Speakers worked great, but laptops in the area had a hard time working on the network. Solution for their AppleTV was to use ethernet into a HomePlug network.

Second experience is with the Sony wireless S-AIR setup. Rear speakers are wireless, along with the ability to have a small boombox type device elsewhere in the house (really cool too, it had playback controls and an LCD to let you change radio stations, skip to the next CD track, or change to the next song on an attached MP3 player). No detectable wireless interference with WiFi, though the setup was also in a rural area where the router may have just changed to a channel far away from the speakers.

I also had a friend who lived next to someone with some sort of wireless speaker setup. Every night around the time they were home and had the TV on, my friends wireless network became very flakey. He also just invested in HomePlug to keep his core network working to the AV system, and eventually migrated to 5GHz when N became the standard.

I have an L shaped room for which I selected the Polk SurroundBar50, aimed down one leg of the L. It provides five audio channels, and does so without depending on reflections from the side walls. In my particular room one 'side' has no side wall.

Does the SDA Surround technology work as well as having discreet side surround speakers? No, but it actually is fairly good.

My own Polk SurroundBar50 (apparently no longer in production) is configured to provide center, left, right, and surround left plus surround right. To complete the 7.1 audio in my case I also have two discreet rear speakers located on the back wall. Plus a subwoofer, of course. All driven by a seven channel AVR amplifier.

With the discreet rear speaker pair disabled the Polk SurroundBar by itself still provides a reasonable sense of space and five channel surround sound. For five channel surround it works fairly well, with no other speakers needed for a decent surround effect.

The SurroundBar uses speaker driver phasing to create the surround channel effect despite the audio being directly transmitted from speaker to your ears. Each of the 'surround' speaker channels uses a pair of drivers, two in each end of the bar, all facing forward.

When I did my research a couple of years ago there were very few options. After excluding those that depend upon side wall reflections for the surround effect, that narrowed it down to the Polk and another very similar product from the same parent company that owns Polk.

I do not recall why I dismissed the Yamaha brand sound bar product at that time, perhaps it is a sound reflection design, or there was some other issue that I had with it.

Judging from the current product descriptions, Polk now supplements the original SDA technology with DSP processing and in some models in-speaker amplifiers.

Hope this is of some help.

That certainly is of some help. The only issue I'm seeing is that the Polk products connect via a single optical cable. It appears that they're designed to just be used with a TV, and not with a receiver. I haven't seen many AV receivers with optical out like this. I could ditch the receiver and just go with the ports on the TV, but I'd have to hope that the TV has optical out, which not all do.

Thanks for the recommendations, though. The Polk products like very promising, and they seem highly rated for the category...