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While multimedia systems can be relatively inexpensive it is completely unreasonable to expect a quality 4.1 or 5.1 surround sound system to cost $100. But wait, you say, there are manufacturers out there who offer exactly that. Yes there are - remember, I did use the word "quality". What you'll get for your $100 is a bare bones system with a boom box for a sub, not much detail to the sound and roll-off of the highs. The upper midrange might be punched up to make them sound "awesome". With the $150-$200 5.1 system that includes a decoder, the best part of that system will be the decoder - you're sacrificing audio quality for the convenience of being able to connect it to an XBox or similar console. Systems like that have to do a trade-off somewhere to keep the price down and what generally gets sacrificed is the audio quality.

My advice? Save your money, wait until you have a bit more (it can be as little as $50) and get something worthwhile. You'll feel a lot happier with your purchase in the long run.

Given that you have a reasonable idea of what to expect for your money, the other key factor that has to be determined is...

Knowing what you want to use them for

I'm a firm believer that anything costing money should be planned for - I'm not an impulse buyer. Having a goal is a must and once you've got that, the way to that goal can be fleshed out. That's why this section is rather simply titled "Know what you want to use them for". All multimedia speakers are not created equal - they each have their strengths and weaknesses. The trick is to match the strengths of a given system to what it's going to be used for. Most people want to use their multimedia system for a variety of uses. The three main categories that I've seen repeated time and time again are games, music and a growing interest in DVDs. The first step is to prioritize the categories since a speaker system used primarily for games will have different characteristics than one for music.

Here's a generic breakdown:

Games

Games are a pretty demanding genre in certain ways and quite lax in others. They require a certain degree of detail but not nearly as much as some types of music. In many ways, their requirements are similar to those of DVDs and I'll get to that. Here's a thumbnail sketch of what's necessary: