We’d love to tell you that this RCA RT2390 500-Watt 5.1 Home Theater System is an elite audio masterpiece and an essential component of anybody’s home theater system. We’d love to lavish praise on its sturdily-constructed, immaculate-sounding speakers. We’d love to assure you that RCA’s legacy of high-quality products is just as strong as ever. We’d love to compare the RCA RT2390 favorably to the sound system at your local multiplex, and insist that it will utterly transform the way you think about home audio.

We’d also love to play second base for the St. Louis Cardinals. Man, that would be awesome.

But we’re bound by reality and the Federal Trade Commission to level with you about the one true selling point of the RCA RT2390 System: it’s a really cheap way to get 5.1 surround sound. Yeah, it sounds decent thanks to 5.1 Dolby Digital, ProLogic II, 100-watt center channel and subwoofer, and 75-watt satellites. It’s got loads of inputs for your home theater components, and it doesn’t look half-bad.

But the only way you’ll get 500 watts out of this thing is to endure an awful lot of distortion along the way. And yeah, the RCA name has changed hands so many times that it’s basically meaningless (sorry, Nipper). If money is no issue – if, say, gold runs out of your nose instead of snot, and buying a better system is just a matter of honking a few extra droplets into a Kleenex – you should probably go buy something else. Those of us who produce regular old mucus will have to be content with a semi-decent surround-sound system for eighty bucks.

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