Crash & Burn

Disclaimer:

The below entry is HEAVY on geeked out gadget stuff and light on bike content. For those that enjoy gadgety goodness while not riding read on. For those the prefer bike content go check out BikeCentric or something

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Yesterday all my planning and preparations to finally adopt HDTV came to fruition. I’ve be extra busy over the past couple of weeks researching and acquiring all the necessary components to do a major home theater refresh. I actually had no idea of just what I was getting into. Surprisingly setting up a HDTV system is a lot more involved than simply visiting your local electronics store and opening up your wallet.

I eventually decided on a Sony Wega 51″ Wide screen with built in HD tuner and cable guard support. The Sony accepted all current HD broadcasting standards and up converts anything you throw at it to 1080i. Karrie and I had actually started out considering other models by vendors such as Toshiba or Pioneer but when we saw them first hand the Sony models just blew them away in picture quality hands down. Everyone has different tastes of course but both Karrie and I always seem to prefer Sony’s offerings. As much as I would have liked to save the money by not paying the Sony premium I just couldn’t sacrifice picture quality for a few hundred bucks. Best Buy had a killer deal on free shipping and a free DVDR recorder so we placed our order. Ordering online also meant I didn’t have to deal with any pushy sales folks, another big plus.

Since no Home Theater is complete without surround sound I also opted to buy a new system for the living room. Since Karrie wasn’t going to let me set up anything with that was going to take over the room so to speak this limited my options a bit. After digging around and reviewing my options I actually went with a Sony home theater in a box solution. The sound quality is great, it supports all the formats I needed and it’s smaller speakers and low key design were acceptable by Karrie’s standards.

So once you finally decide on a HD television you still need to figure out where you’re going to get your HD source material. There are currently three basic options currently available Cable, Satellite & Over The Air. Each has it’s own set of pros and cons and the setup varies greatly between them.

The issue that really tends to complicate things is figuring out how to record HD material. The ideal solution for me would have been a HD Standalone tivo machine. Since Tivo has yet to get off their arse and offer such a box I had to do some serious digging to find a suitable solution. After countless hours spent researching a wide range of options such as Microsoft’s Media Center or even Satellite I discovered that Comcast was now offering the Motorola 6412 III settop box. The new 6412 III boasts dual tuners, HD PVR support and a much improved program guide and user interface over previous iterations. The best part of all is it would only cost me an addition $6.00 a month. Thankfully I was lucky enough to find a local office that had the new boxes in stock so I stopped by and swapped out my old digital non pvr box for the new model.

So I now had all the components lined up to receive my broadcast television in HD. What I really needed now was a DVD player that could help take advantage of the HDTV. The thing with DVD is it’s native format is 480p where as the HDTV I chose is 1080i. Now my tv would have no issues in displaying 480p however it wouldn’t look nearly as nice as it could under those circumstances. A number of manufacturers are now offering quality progressive scan DVD players that include build in up-converters. What this does is take your 480p signal and basically upscale it to the resolution of your choice to match your HDTV. In my case I wanted to go straight to 1080i. Again after a couples days research I settled on a Samsung 850. The Samsung gets great reviews, is reasonable priced and is one of the very few players that can be made to up-convert over component outputs. Thankfully the Samsung is readily available at Best Buy and circuit city so I found one no problem.

Now that I had a DVR/HD Tuner and DVD player I had pretty much everything I needed for my new Home Theater system. The last couple of things that I wanted to add were the ability to view my photo archives on the new tv as well as stream my sizeable MP3 library to my stereo. I thought I had hit pay dirt in a set top box that purported to do both via the Dlink DSM-320. I picked this thing up on a total impulse while browsing Best Buy. As it turned out that thing was awful. To make a long story short it was a nightmare to setup and never worked right. I returned it promptly the very next day. Avoid this thing like you would the plague it’s basically a $200 piece of junk. I ended up exchanging the Dlink for the similarly priced Roku Soundbridge. Unlike the Dlink the Roku was a breeze to setup and worked as expected right out of the box. It connected to my home network via a wireless Ethernet connection and allows me to browse and play mp3’s from Itunes which runs on a PC in my computer room. The one and only drawback is that the Roku doesn’t do photos. So for now I’ve abandoned Photo support for my Home Theater. I will be building a Microsoft Media Center machine in the near future to fulfill this need. I’ll also likely replace the functionality of the Roku and move it off to another room in the house.

The last piece I picked up was a Harmony universal remote to control everything. I didn’t want to deal with a huge pile of remotes and Karrie gets frustrated by complicated AV setups so I had to do what I could to enable ease of use. The Harmony while pricey was worth every penny. It simplifies programming by connecting to your PC via usb cable and using a series of web based wizards. The only downside is you do have to be connected to the Internet. It took me some time to test and get it 100% but in the end I was left with 1 simple very nice remote that could do it all. Best of all it has it’s own built in help system which can walk novices through the basics of solving any problems. The Harmony was money well spent.

It took me about 2 weeks to do the research mentioned and acquire all the pieces listed above. It definitely ate up a lot of free time and between riding and work there isn’t all that much available to begin with. Thankfully it’s now pretty much done.

Yesterday as I mentioned I actually received my TV so all that was left was to set it up. I spent pretty much the entire day running cables and setting up the above mentioned devices to work with one another. I had the most trouble with the Comcast DVR actually. It did take repeated calls to get it activated properly. Once it finally got take care of thought it was flawless. The thing that was truly fitting was the very first HD programming that I saw on my new TV. Of all the things I could have found upon firing up my first HD channel I tuned into a High Def special on the Red Bull Rampage. Holy crap the quality was well simply stunning. The sharpness and overall level of detail was almost overwhelming. It looked so great in fact that I hit the record button to capture the remaining program, turned the TV Off and went out for a ride. I had already been feeling the itch to ride so after seeing that I needed to ride. I guess it should be as no surprise that the desire to ride actually overpowered my desire to play with my new gadgets . I actually had a great ride over at Black Hills before returning home to finish up with the TV stuff.

When Karrie got home we tried moving the living room around a bit before we settled on the final configuration we could both live with. By the time we were done we didn’t have a whole lot of time left to watch a movie. We ended up watching an episode of Rescue Me, which looked great over the new up-converting DVD player. We also spent some time channel surfing the High Def stuff. The funny thing about HD is at least initially it’s so cool to look at that it makes even boring programming interesting. Dicovery HD was showing some kind of nature oriented program regarding composting and recycling. Man compost piles have never looks so good. I am however thankful that we don’t have smell-a-vision enable content just yet . I was also really surprised by how much content is available with Dolby Digital. Even a bunch of kids cartoons I came across were done in Dolby Digital. Damn cool stuff I never knew cable television could be so damn cool.

Tonight I’m looking forward to a post ride movie with Karrie. It should be a lot of fun getting to enjoy the new setup. Since Karrie greatly prefers staying in and watching DVDs to going to the movies this new setup is a blessing. I think I finally have a system that I don’t mind staying at home to use. I wonder how much our netflix activity is going to spike over the next month?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 11:37 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.