Home Theater Catch Up (10 comments)
I realized over the weekend that I'm a bit behind the times in my home theater setup. Because of the number of devices hooked up to my TV and the slow, evolutionary path it took to reach this point, my current set up is a bit awkward:
(The DVD player is ghosted because it's only hooked up when I find a DVD the Playstation 2 can't handle.)
Everything goes into the TV, and then the audio comes out of the TV and goes into the receiver to feed my surround speakers. That's unnecessarily complex from a sound routing standpoint, but it's worked out nicely from a user interface standpoint; in most cases, all switching between inputs can be done by the TV and the sound follows as expected.
Convenient as it is, that configuration limits my audio choices to analog RCA cabling. While that allows me to decode Dolby Pro-Logic, there are nicer things out there. Thinking about that, I began to research receivers. The one I'm using doesn't do video switching. I've had it since junior high, and it's always done a great job with my CDs, and in the current setup, I've only a few complaints with its surround capabilities. Still, it can't do what I want, so it'll be reassigned. I decided to replace it with a Sony STR-DE698. After that's installed, I'll be at Stage 1:
With all the video going through the receiver, the TV will only need a single component input, and I will have discovered that octagons have twice as many faces and vertices as rectangles. The DirecTiVo and DVD player can use their digital audio outputs (as could the Playstation 2, but I'd have to move it out of couch range or buy a long (expensive) cable) instead of the analog RCA outputs they're using now. Not only that, but they can use newer Dolby encodings, or even DTS. It'll also be nice to have finer tuning to compensate for the size differences between my front and rear speakers.
In the long-term, Andy-my-officemate put a naughty, naughty idea in my head. He suggested that I could replace my RCA and S-Video switches with a full-on receiver and send a single component video signal across the floor alongside a single digital coaxial cable. Right now, there's a bundle of seven cables running from the coffee table to the TV stand: composite, S-Video, and component video along with four RCA audio lines. Such a change would look a little like this:
It remains to be seen how technology will affect that idea. It's nothing I'd do in the near future, but with higher quality signals from the next-gen game consoles and the prospect of an HDTV to display them, it might make sense.