triv.org

After a good three months of thought and work, my home theater is done. A few thoughts on components:

Television

I love my plasma tv (a Panasonic TH-42PHD7UY). It does it exactly what I need. It displays any video source from 480 interlaced to 1080 progressive(!) with wonderful accuracy and depth. The black levels are excellent and the color performance is almost perfect after calibration. Most people will want to get the consumer version of this TV, as this one does not have speakers or a tuner. For my system, all I needed was a monitor and this does exactly that.

Speakers

B&W rocks. That is all.

Receiver

I really like my Denon AVR-2100. It sounds marvelous, has plenty of power, includes an auto-setup which gets the levels and timings just right, supports every encoding you can throw at it, does video up-converting and switching perfectly, and it didn't break the budget. I do have a few annoyances with it however. It doesn't have true 5 way binding posts, just odd 3 way posts. The posts are spaced very tightly, making it tough to use bare cable connections. The mode change click is really too loud. The volume is a bit to hard to control with the remote. I wish there were two more component video inputs.

Cable

I'm actually very impressed with the hi-def offerings from comcast. It just works. I get both satellite HD channels like Discovery and HBO, and all the over the air local networks. The oddest point was when the tech came to install the HD box. I had a optical audio cable ready for it, and he commented that no one had ever used that in his experience. Isn't digital surround sound one of the big features of HDTV?

Cables

AudioQuest makes some damn fine cables. When I switched out my crappy generic cables with AQ runs, I quickly noticed a big difference. Both the sound and the picture became clearer. Not only do their products perform, but their customer service is great. My plasma has BNC connectors instead of RCAs, so they made me a RCA to BNC cable. Which, by the way, is a fucking cool cable.

After using AudioQuest cables, I swore off Monster. I then promptly bought some Monster speaker cable that's rated to be installed in-wall. It's for the surrounds. It was cheap, it sounds pretty darn good, and it got the job done.

DVD Player

I wanted three things from a DVD player. Good general video quality, good deinterlacing (the process of converting the interlaced video on the disc to a progressive signal), and universal compatibility (the ability to play DVDs, CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, MP3 CDs, etc...). I got all three of those with the Yamaha DVD-S2500. It's a very nice DVD player.

Remote

I have actually used the sentence "programming my remote is fun" while not being sarcastic. The Harmony 880 is just that good. You pick it up, hit the button next to what you want to do and then you're done. I've been known to nitpick user interfaces to death, but this one held up to scrutiny. It's simple. It's intuitive. It's superlative.

So now that it's all together, I'm happy with the results. Watching movies or TV, playing video games, and listening to music are all a hoot on the new system. I've also learned that projects like this are never over, you either run out of money or you die. I can already think of a few things I would like to add.