astrallite

The subwoofer will not drive the satellites. The ony purpose of the low level inputs is to make sure the input signal to the speakers will have a crossover slope, nothing else. The sub output has to go to an a/v receiver to power the satellites.

The deal on the Klipschs isn't really anything special. These speakers are from 1997 and the receiver is ancient. Looking at audioreview, you coulda probably bought that set used for $900...in 2003. If you can barter that down to $500-600 it might be worth it.

Like bookshelf speakers.

You could try and see the results, but chances are you will have a quite a bit of trouble hearing dialogue in movies

Are you just guessing, or did you measure the output with a mic?

Nothing stops a speaker from working on any electrical source--they are just passive mechanical devices. I assume you have an A/V receiver?

Recording engineers will tell you that typically the best response from a subwoofer is to place it 38% the length of the room from the nearest corner, on either of the longer side walls.

Are you getting those sets for free? If you are paying you coulda gotten much better speakers for the amount you paid for those MM speakers.

Klipsch 2.0 Ultra, Logitech Z-10, Gigaworks T-20/T-40 are all good portable systems. The 2.0 Ultra has the typical crappy Klipsch volume pot which crackles like an old hag. That was one of the reasons my roommate dumped it for an iFi.

There could be a number of reasons why dialogue is difficult to hear. 1) a particularly reflective Room 2) a large room 3) a tweeter with poor off-axis performance 4) low SNR pre-amp I assume this is not a TV sitting on your desk and you are actually sitting away from it at some distance. #3 and #4 will definitely affect your ability to hear vocals. I've heard the ifi and it's fantastic, but they are a pair of multimedia speakers so compared to typical stereo/ht speakers their performance suffers quite a bit from bad off-axis performance and a noisy pre-amp. If this is in a office-sized room, then #1 (and #2) is unlikely. So a few questions: 1) How big is a the room 2) How far away do you sit from your TV? 3) How far away are the speakers from you?