This is one of those wonderful ideas that works perfectly as a surround rear speakers product. Simple to set up and it works and sounds great. I was not interested in running wires for the rear speakers of our new system and this fit our needs exactly.
Rocketfish Wireless Rear Speaker Kit RF-WHTIB
Just hooked this surround rear speakers up a week ago for our RCA 5.1 Home Theater 5-DVD Entertainment System in a 500 square foot living room and it works fine! In fact it works better than I expected! It is easy to setup, with rich sound, looks really cool, low profile, no wires across living room floor! works best for 5.1 dolby surround sound movies and music dvds and tv shows.
The hook up was really simple. I’m not sure what qualifies as “cheap wiring” in light of what the other reviewer says, but the kit came with sufficient wiring and the wiring connectors in the kit are universal so you can add your own expensive wiring (like we did) or simply use the ones on your existing home theater system.
Although the hook up was simple, it took us a few minutes after the kit was hooked up to realize that the rear surround speakers
ONLY work when the source on your home theater system is playing surround sound music or movies. When one of the FM stations was on and playing we didn’t get any sound from the rear speaker (only a slight hiss-but nothing distracting).
However, when we put the X-Men 3 DVD in and pressed play the living room came alive with rich Surround Sound.
This is how we came to understand not all sources will give you Surround Sound(Yeah, surround rear speakers) on the Rocketfish wireless kit. It has nothing to do with the performance of the RocketFish kit which would be the thing you would obviously blame first.
Like most home theater systems our RCA home theater system has a changeable preset for “Stereo” , “Subwoofer” and “Surround” along with the Equalizer settings. “Stereo” was our defaulted setting so we had to change it to Surround Mode to get the full effect of the kit. Because of this the Rear Surround speakers when hooked up thru the Rocketfish Kit ONLY works well when our RCA system is set specifically in Surround Mode and the Stereo Mode is turned off. This would explain why many reviewers give this bad reviews on the basis that the units are non functioning when they first hook it up.
My audio-video receiver can also be used to play surround sound but like I said I’m not using the Rocketfish kit for playing surround sound in the same room, but to play stereo sound in different rooms. I don’t doubt that if I wanted to set this up for surround sound, it will work just as well – in which case the audio source will then have to be playing in surround sound mode (just like another reviewer here mentioned).
This is not in the Rocketfish manual but for the kit to work correctly you need to have
1) A source that gives surround sound (DVD, FM station, TV show, CD, etc…) on home theater system
2) You need to switch your home theater system settings from Stereo to Surround mode or completely turn off Stereo Mode.
3) You also need to have a 5.1 home theater system that is capable of 5.1 Surround Sound Mode.
When all these conditions are met, the Rocketfish Wireless kit works well. And if your source is not playing surround sound you can easily turn off the surround speakers at the rear by turning off the Rocketfish kit or switching your Home Theater System’s settings back to Stereo. Easy!
My brother-in-law who is a home entertainment dealer has indicated he’ll ship me a Paradymn speaker system at cost. I’m not holding my breath. At any rate my brother-in-law isn’t the topic here. If he were he’s get one star…..maybe. The Rocketfish seems to perform flawlessly. Only minor down side is that it doesn’t come back on by itself if there a power outage. As the rear receiver is under a end table that can be annoying. Move rear volume control and on/off to the front of box in next generation.
