Home Theater

Last modified: 2003.02.05

Our old stereo consists of the speakers and CD player I had in high school and a cheap receiver I bought on sale at Sears in Memphis when I had just started graduate school. Not really cutting as much mustard as I'd like, I must say.

So, I set out on a project to make a decent home theater for watching movies and TV, as well as listening to music. The main reason is that we (especially I) like movies a lot. I like audio elements of movies like sound design and theatrical music and I want it to sound good. The music part is intended to get me away from the computer at night.

Furniture

First, we ordered some pretty nice racks from Sanus Systems. We definitely needed something new, and this furniture is just right.

We like this a lot more than the huge entertainment centers you see at furniture stores, mostly because our living room is too small to accomodate a bank vault sized monstrosity.

These racks have lovely cable management and an attractive combination of wood, glass, and metal. So far, so good.

Budget

I quickly discovered that you can spend whatever you like for home audio. If you want to spend $100, you can do that. If you want to spend $50,000, you can do that too. Someone is willing to take however much money you have in mind.

We decided on a budget towards the lower end of that range, then through a clever combination of deceit, rationalization, and "90 days same as cash", I unscrupulously doubled it. Don't tell Julie...

The Purchase

After a disturbing amount of online research and much hand-wringing, I went down to the store and bought this list of Expensive Black Things:

Brought it home, hooked it up, was happy. Mostly. The trick to this sort of thing is that you can never leave well enough alone. You always have the feeling that it could sound 0.002% better if you moved that speaker half an inch to the left. This is OK; it satisfies the goal of having me spend some time in the living room, anyway.

Brought home the new furniture, unhooked everything, assembled the furniture, hooked it back up, was even happier.

New TV

There wasn't anything all that wrong with our old TV. It's a nice 27" Sony Trinitron with a mangled remote control courtesy of guess who. But it was small for the space and didn't look as great with DVDs as I liked and (so on and so forth.)

So, after much shopping and a false start, we got a new TV. It's a Sony KV-36XBR450, which is a 36" FD Trinitron Wega XBR FancyPants Blah Blah model. It looks great. And if they ever figure out HDTV, we're ready.

Sadly, the TV stand we had just bought became too small once the new TV happened, so we got the bigger stand. Anyone want to take a barely used Sanus NF203c stand off my hands? Let me know...

Here's a picture of the whole thing:

A picture of The System

I like it.

"Listen to *that*!"

DVD and Dolby Digital 5.1 represents a whole new world of watching a movie. Poor Julie; she has to put up with me saying, "Wow, listen to that! I wanna hear that again!", which I feel kinda bad about, but hey, just listen to how great that is!

Other than things like gunshots and door slams scaring the snot out of the dogs, it's wonderful.

More observations later as I start moving speakers around half an inch here and there...