So I had a lot of fun over the past several days researching possible upgrades to our old surround sound receiver. It has been an educational week or so, and in the process I completely gutted our two entertainment center stacks of gear; vacuumed out the cubby holes where everything was, wiping it all down, and reconnecting those things we still want.
I will post a list of stuff we are giving away and/or selling in a bit (DVD player, CD player, Laserdiscs).
One huge win is that the picture is vastly better on both televisions now that I have used proper cables and removed old VHS decks from the loop (who knew they were so damned noisy?). A second huge win is that I never realized that I had our receiver hooked up incorrectly, and we’ve never heard Dolby Digital (aka: AC-3) surround sound properly before… and wow. I was wrong. It sounds much better than I previously supposed, and importantly, if properly encoded the voice track is vastly easier to hear than I previously thought. I hate that on so many movies and shows in stereo mode I cannot hear the dialogue because the music/gunshots/jet engines are so damned loud. True 5.1 surround (either Dolby Digital or DTS), hooked up properly actually helps a lot with this problem.
Let me restate: the same old DVDs that have been annoying the hell out of me because I can’t hear the dialogue are once again thrilling because the AC-3 encoding is finally working on my surround sound receiver! I can hear the dialogue again.
Sadly, our old receiver can only decode Dolby Digital (AC-3). It does not handle DTS, nor any of the newer encodings. Additionally, the old receiver only has two digital inputs (one optical, one coaxial) and my DVD player and DISH receiver are both optical outputs… so I only get one or the other; and have to re-connect cables to change that. Time for a switch or a new receiver (which is what spurred this whole research project to begin with).
I looked at brand new receivers… which differ from the receivers I was familiar with the last time I went shopping. In the early 1990s, no one bothered to connect video to a receiver. You simply used it for audio; and the video went into your television directly (less noise, better cabling types). Now that has dramatically changed. Modern receivers handle video very well, sometimes even better than your television set.
Having said that, your video will never be better than the weakest link in the chain from your signal source (DVD player, Cable receiver, whatever) all the way to the screen. Since my TV is old, but working beautifully (and so NOT getting replaced soon), the new receiver’s extra special HDMI up-scaling features are meaningless to me.
Additionally, new receivers are just beginning to get a fabulous new feature: dynamic volume control (called by slightly different names from different makers) will dampen the sudden onslaught of annoyingly loud noise when commercials interrupt your favorite shows. This feature is so new, it is only on some of the receivers (most Denon, some newest Onkyo and Yamaha) and it is likely to get revised a little before everyone has to have it. So there is good reason to wait a year or two before buying a new receiver.
No receiver that I can find will decode AAC 5.1 (used for discrete surround sound on streaming media). This is very important to me because I suspect more and more movie rentals will be on demand over the internet, and AC-3 and DTS do NOT lend themselves to streaming very efficiently. I think I will buy a new receiver when they can handle AAC 5.1 as well as Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio. That way I can play DVDs, Blue-ray discs, and stream videos with whatever set top box ends up winning the marketplace for movie rentals on demand and internet content. Both AppleTV and Netflix are pioneering very interesting efforts in this area.
I am also completely uninterested in Blue-ray at this time. In a year or two I may change my mind, but right now it is too expensive, too proprietary, and too hyped up in marketing noise. It also encourages two new surround sound standards (TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) that will replace DTS and AC-3, but are expensive right now. Waiting will let those decoders get into more and more affordable receivers. So the features of a new TV and new HDMI receiver with fancy HD video processing are mostly lost on me.
Good news, I can shop craig’s list and ebay for cheap receivers from the last few years to get more digital input ports and to get DTS decoding (a lot of my existing DVDs are DTS) as well as AC-3 (that I have now). My hearing impaired friends will love listening to DTS and AC-3 DVDs we have now once we get the vintage 2000-2005 receiver installed for relatively little money.
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