Setting up external home-ent speakers - help?

Hardware and technical stuff
21

For how complicated all this crap it, believe me that it is worth it. There is a certain sense of pride you feel once you’ve gotten everything set up and working, and the experience is riveting when done right. You really don’t know what you’re missing. Sound is often a very overlooked part of the audio/video equation, but our ears are so much more easily fooled than our eyes. Graphics are great and getting better all the time, but a good home theater will make well-rendered sound effects sound like they are really happening in your living room - it’s a sense of realism and immersion that brings the experience to another level.

It just feels so awesome to crank stuff up, sit in the middle of the speakers, and feel every explosion vibrate through you, the crack of every shot, the high-pitched squeal of the chainsaw revving up right behind you… aw crap.

Gears of War, which I know you love, did a VERY good job on the sound. That right there mandates that you take advantage of it.

22

Heh, I believe it, really I do.

My only concern now is neighbors banging on the wall.

23

Oh yeah… I knew there was a reason I rent a house :)

24

It’s all relative, I guess. The Onkyo it replaced was bigger, and the Denon AVR-4306 in my office/lab is bigger, too.

Here’s the rack the Pioneer lives in now; you can see the Onkyo it replaced at the bottom:

Loyd’s A/V Rack

25

Yea these receivers can make the PS3 look like a gameboy micro in terms of size.

Of course Whitta once you get a good HT setup you’ll need a Harmony Remote

26

Jeez, it never ends…

27

I’m confused because according to the Amazon specs that Panasonic unit doesn’t have an HDMI connection.

28

Hey, you used to edit PC Gamer. You should know this by now!

;-)

29

You have a nice rack, Loyd.

30

Oops sorry I linked the wrong one:

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SA-XR57S-Digital-Theater-Receiver/dp/B000FYZQSW/sr=1-1/qid=1165014953/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-3786237-0802424?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

31

I have a similar question: I’m currently in the midst of setting up a proper home theatre setup (yay new lcd hdtv!). I’m currently using a Kenwood HTB s710 HTIB. So far, it’s been good enough. However, I’m not so sure it accepts hdtv signals. I’ve currently got my 360 hooked up through the vga port on the tv, and am using the 2 component inputs on the reciever for my hd-tuner [whoops, this is incorrect. see below] and ps2 (my xbox is mothballed and my gcn is composite as component are too hard to come by and I’ll be picking up a Wii eventually anyway).

So far, everything has been okay. I guess the only real reason for passing all the video inputs through the reciever is simplicity? I.e: I wont have to be constantly switching video sources on the tv and audio sources on the reciever, is that correct?

edit (for clarity):

My current setup:
Xbox 360: VGA -> TV / Optical out -> reciever
PS2: Component -> reciever / optical out -> reciever
hdtv-tuner: component -> tv / coax audio -> reciever
GCN: Composite -> reciever / audio -> reciever

The reciever is connected to the tv in two ways: One composite connection, and one component (it doesn’t upscale). What this means is when I want to play my 360, I have to swap the tv to “PC” (what it calls the vga input), and the reciever to video 2. If I wanna play my ps2, I swap the tv to the component 1 and the reciever to video 1. If I want to watch tv, I have to put my tv to component 2 and my reciever to video 3. And if I want to play gamecube, I have to put my tv to video 3 and my reciever to ‘aux’. Very confusing.

edit edit: I should also note: I’m not completely dependant on my 360 being dependant on a VGA connection, it’s just that I ran out of component inputs and had the cable laying around from my pre-hdtv days when I played it through my monitor.

edit edit edit: One last thing, the kenwood I’m using was free, so it’s not like I’m wasting money on something new.

32

One more question… If I run video directly from the PS3 to my TV via HDMI, and sound through an AV receiver via digital optical, is it possible the picture/sound might come through out of sync? Or am I being a total AV n00b?

33

Correct.

If that happens then it’s likely that your receiver or player is defective.

34

Some sets, notably Samsungs from 03 and 04, had a fairly major problem with this - the video processing in the units introduced a lag which would cause the A and the V to not sync right if the A wasn’t being directly run through the set.

This really isn’t much of a problem anymore though. Most mid-range and better receivers have the ability to set a delay in order to manually sync the sound with the picture, but this isn’t really a solution at all if you’re talking games.

35

Okay, so I snappped. I went to Best Buy and got myself hooked up.

I got this receiver

And these speakers

Spent about two hours stripping and running speaker wire all over the living room, then went through the receiver’s auto-calibration. It’s really cool, it gives you a microphone to plug in, then blasts different sounds from each speaker to the microphone, which takes that data and figures out how to best calibrate each speaker for their position on the room. Really nice feature.

So I dialed up the volume a bit and set the receiver to VIDEO 1 (my cable box), and

HOLY SHIT

The cable box was set to HBO HD, which was showing War of the Worlds, and it was at the exact moment where the first tripod comes out of the ground and starts blowing everything to shit.

I nearly crapped in my pants, the sound was coming from EVERYWHERE. I actually had to grab for the mute button, it freaked me out so much at first. Dialed the volume back down and bit and listened for a while… absolutely amazing.

So yeah, you were right. It’s HD for the ears. I love it. The only problem is I am seriously worried about the neighbors next door. My roommate went over there to give them a heads-up that I was setting up surround sound and they were like, “Uh, yeah, we can tell.”

So we’re now in the process of re-arranging the entire living room to move the home theater setup away from the wall that adjoins the neighbors house and over to the far wall which doesn’t back onto anything. Hopefully that will make it a bit easier to enjoy this thing without disturbing the neighbors.

Thanks for all the advice so far in this thread. I’m sure I’ll have more questions later now I’ve got it set up. So far I’ve got FM and AM radio running through it (it comes with antennae for both) and connected my iPod to it. I love all the different default settings for movies and music (there’s a setting for sci-fi and action movies, a setting for “regular movies”, jazz club and concert hall settings for music… brilliant) and it also has an XM input so I think I might pick up a home antenna and add this device to my existing subscription because I’ve been looking for an XM home solution for a while and it looks like I might have just got one without even realizing it.

Did I mention I love this thing?

36

Huzzah!

Have you tried gaming with this new setup?

37

The discussion here pretty well confirmed my decision to keep listening to my crappy television speakers.

38

Not yet, everything is currently disconnected and in bits while I move everything to the other side of the room. With any luck will be up and gaming by tonight.