For the past few days I’ve been passing along ways to “Beat Black Friday.” It’s surprisingly easy to do if you dig a little for the big-ticket items and realize most of the big-box deals on electronics are just closeouts of last year’s stock anyway. 

That said, today’s installment may be cheating a little bit. One thing Black Friday is almost always completely devoid of is high-end audio. Whether it’s speakers, subwoofers, or A/V receivers (AVRs), you’re not likely to see anything better than an HTiB (home theater in a box) in a sales flyer from now until January. 

Perennial AV outlet favorite Accessories 4 Less is helping to remedy this to a certain degree. First up, they’re offering a 5.1 package from Canton at an unbeatable price of only $989.  Consisting of Canton GLE 403 main speakers, GLE 402 surround speakers, GLE 405 center speaker, and an AS80 subwoofer, this package is about as good as you can do for under $1k right now, especially in a small/medium size room. The GLE line offers a lot of trickle-down technology from the much more expensive Ergo and Chrono lines, and by using bookshelf speakers with a sub, you’re wasting far less cash on large main speakers that would likely end up crossed over at 80Hz anyway. At $989, this is $10 less than just the speakers at their B-stock price! That’s like getting the very capable compact subwoofer for free. When compared to MSRP, it’s a savings of over $1,000, or more than 50%!

If you’re looking for a feature-packed AVR to power this package, take a look at their B Stock deal on the Onkyo HT-RC160.  I’ve written about this unit before, which is a near identical clone of the popular SR607 unit, just missing the front HDMI input and Sirius Satellite Radio support.  At $299, this is the lowest point-of-entry possible for features like 1080p scaling, analog video transcoding, Dolby ProLogic IIz with Height channels, and Dolby TrueHD/DTS HD-Master decoding. Also included is an IXOS 2m HDMI cable, a $35 value. 

Beat that, Black Friday ... or at least try a little harder on the high-end audio. 

About the Author:
Stephen Hopkins

Stephen Hopkins is a DIY Correspondent for Electronic House. The 26-year-old engineer has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Always looking for a bargain, the home theater enthusiast built his first subwoofer in 2002. Stephen provides product reviews and DIY tips for EH readers. He can be reached at shopkins.ehpub@gmail.com.