2016 Enclave Audio CineHome HD 5.1 Wireless Home Theater System

My saga started out with a lot of frustration by buying the latest, greatest Samsung sound bars and "wireless surround speakers" to go with my Samsung TVs. Got them home and hooked up the Sound bar and the accompanying sub. Not too shabby. Then I went to hook up the surround sound speakers via the BT interface. No joy. I called Samsung Support who assured me I had gotten a bad unit, and to have it replaced. This I did with the new speakers having the same issue ... they would not connect to the sound bar. A second call to Samsung revealed that the speakers I had bought as a bundle would not work together, and I would need to wait several moths until the compatible receiver/speaker pair was released.Needless to say, those went right back. Then I started doing some more research and came across the Enclave CinehomeHD system. Sure, it was more than the bundle I had just returned, but it looked like it should work, since it creates it's own 5Gig network and all the speakers connect wirelessly.I laughed when I saw the review that said it would take longer to un-box the speakers than to set it all up. So I decided to time myself. Total time to un-box and place speakers was just over 20 minutes from start to finish. Once that was done and the speakers were powered on, I connected the Smart Center speaker to power and to the TV via HDMI (out from the speaker) then back to it with an optical cable. OK, I am 22 minutes and counting.Next step was to find some batteries for the remote. That added another 2 or 3 minutes. So just under 25 minutes from cutting the tape and opening all the individual speaker boxes and having everything ready to go. I set my TV to the HDMI channel from the smart speaker and hit the power button on the remote. After a few seconds. I got a message that all speakers were OK. I hit the menu button and make my selections, guessing at what speaker levels and surround sound delay should be (got pretty damned close first try). I listened to the noise generator on all the speakers and made a few small adjustments.I am now sitting at 30 minutes from un-boxing to a functioning 5.1 surround system. (It might have been a few minutes less if the cats hadn't decided that each box needed to be explored and scooted around the room and determined that the freshly unfurled power cords were something akin to a ball of yarn). 🐱‍👤😎Now it was time to set the speaker output on the TV to optical and see how it sounded ...Wow, I was impressed. It sounded more like a movie theater experience than the Samsung soundbar and sub, and multitudes better than the chintzy speakers in the TV. I dimmed the lights and through on a movie that I thought would have some nice surround sound in it. The music in the intro was nice, and I heard a few things coming from the surrounds that made it enjoyable.Then came the actual movie. OK,front speakers sound great and the sub is pumping some really nice rumbling lows, but not a lot though the surrounds. That is until there was an announcement on the ship that came from the surrounds that were so crisp and clear, it scared me a little.I;m sure I will do a little more tweaking on the balance and the delay until it is perfect for my room, but what a GREAT start.In closing, I will say this ... The price of this system, for what you get is incredible. The sound is phenomenal right out of the box, and it is the easiest sound system I have ever set up. For the money, you can't go wrong. For the absence of speaker wire, you can't go wrong. For the ease of setup, you can't go wrong.Many have said that the remote was lacking. My remote said 2.0, so I am thinking Enclave listened and improved it a bit. I believe a few more buttons than the original. Still could stand some more improvement, like a little screen so you don;t have to use your TV to see what you are doing. Other than that, this system exceeded my expectations by quite a bit.If you are looking for a reasonably priced wireless surround sound system, check this bad boy out! I would highly recommend it to anyone looking whether they cared about wires or not. In fact, I already have told several of my friends how easy it is to set up and how good it sounds.Great job, Enclave Audio! 👌

Kittens and speaker cables don't mix. After endless issues with them pawing at the cords and causing our hyper-sensitive Sony amplifier to go into "protect" mode because a whisker of wire someplace touched something, I gave up and bought this. The reviews I read said it gave respectable sound, so I expected it to be so-so: better than a sound bar, but not as good as a wired system, just more convenient.My old system was a mid-range Sony amplifier (STR-860), a Sony sub-woofer and Polk surround sound speakers. When it wasn't shorting out (which was most of the time), it sounded pretty good. Well, this new system sounds better, albeit for about twice the cost of the old system. It's a snap to set up--everything is labeled, so you can't do it wrong. We watched Inception and Jurassic Park as a test. The sub-woofer has good depth--better than our old one--and the surround sound speakers also have solid range and response. Best of all, no speaker wire cluttering up the bedroom! Yay!While I'm happy with the sound quality and convenience, I have to say, not all is perfect. The system is only HDCP 1.4 compliant, not the newer 2.2 standard. The infuriating thing here, of course, is that the HDCP standard provides zero benefit to the consumer--it's a digital rights management scheme imposed by the industry and we all have to pay for it even though we get no benefit from it. The newer standard is, by design, not backward compatible with the old standard. So, if you have a new, 4K ultra-high-def TV, and your cable box, or Roku box, or whatever, ALSO uses the newer standard, it won't work to pass the signal through a device with the *older* standard. As far as the HDCP 2.2. TV and cable box are concerned, anything in between that's NOT HDCP 2.2 is trying to steal protected property and the transmission fails. As you can tell, the people who design these standards have, shall we say, a casual disdain for you and me, the consumer.So anyway, IF one of your devices is sending HDCP 2.2 signals and IF your TV is trying to *accept* HDCP 2.2 signals, then when you try to pass the signal through your new Enclave system via HDMI cables, it fails. All you see is a blue screen, or, worse yet, a flashing, strobe-like image. Again, yay. This raises the question why the folks at Enclave chose to only implement the HDCP 1.4 standard, but I can guess why. Not only do you and I have to pay for this more-or-less crippled feature of our equipment, the *manufacturers* have to pay to USE the standard. It's cheaper to use the old standard than the new, so they kept their cost--and ours!--down by only implementing HDCP 1.4. Generally, if you're happy with Blue Ray level video (I am), then that works if you down grade the HDCP 2.2 signal to HDCP 1.4. That means you can kiss ultra-high-def video goodbye, since HDCP 2.2 is designed specifically to keep you from stealing the shows you are watching. But it ALSO means you've got to buy another box (for around $30) to make your system work if you wind up, as I did, with HDCP errors and no video.Except...there IS another work-around. The Enclave system is designed like my old Sony amplifier: plug your "input" devices (cable box, Roku, Blue Ray player) into the Enclave smart center speaker, and then run one cable from the speaker to your TV to carry the video. As noted above, that can lead to HDCP failure and NO video. The alternative is to run your "input" devices directly to your TV, assuming both ends are HDCP 2.2 compliant. Then--assuming your TV lets you do this, and most do--you can run an optical audio cable from your TV to the optical jack on the Enclave smart center speaker, and the problem is solved! You've got the ultra-high-def video on your 4K TV and digitial sound (but not ultra-high-def sound) coming out of your speakers.There are other issues with making THAT work having to do with how you set the Enclave system to know its input will be the optical sound port. A Harmony remote comes in handy for that, but this review is already too long.The bottom line is that I like this system, although it turned out to be harder to set up than I'd expected due to HDCP errors. No matter--it was still a gazillion times easier than trying to track down which speaker wire the cats had jinxed.

I bought this surround sound unit hoping for quality sound and the ease of setup with the wireless speaker feature. The setup wasn't so easy but the tech support was fast and able to walk me through it. Basically if you use the arc feature with the HDMI cable so video and sound pass through the sound bar you're asking for a major problem. I had it set up that way and for every input I changed my tv to, whether it be my TiVo, an app on my tv like Vudu, a bluray player--it didn't matter because you had to jump through hoops to change the input for each one and get the sound to work. My vizio soundbar worked instantly with each input transfer and no hoops to jump through(which is why I went back to it). The only way you can bypass the arc feature is to use like the optical audio, which is what I did, but the sound sucks on both optical and arc with the enclave.The sound on the enclave is surround sound but to me was substandard at best compared to my vizio and had no solid sounds to it--it was all one note and low clarity. Bass wasn't there at all, even with the sub woofer. 100 watts of treble and no impact sound on high action films. Very bad sound and big speakers to boot.I had this unit in my watch list on amazon and when I first put it in there it was $799 and a couple days later it dropped to $399; save 50%. I figured I'd jump on it and save some money...It's not even worth $3.99 in my opinion. This has to be the worst surround system on the market so don't waste your time or money buying it because you won't be satisfied--GUARENTEED!I now got my vizio hooked back up and am very happy with it and sticking with it after this experience and the enclave with its prehistoric sound is where it belongs-- in a cave.