The Home Theater Showcase Thread

LULZ ^^^


Again guys - you are completely correct in your claim that BluRay is top quality - I am not disputing that.

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How so? If you've got an SD audio receiver it'll extract the standard DD or DTS lossy sound track from the Blu Ray (which has to be there) so your sound will be no worse than a DVD's.

On the point of replacing my DVDs, I'm certainly not. Only ones which I feel deserve it.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Because AVRs without discreet amplification degrade audio, and low-current, dirty power degrades it further. Most Audio forums have guides that cover the subject. Of course, when i got my HK AVR, I wanted to see this in action for myself, just to make sure the cash I had spent was justified.

I set up my system and stacked the two units side by side. I grabbed a few Source CD/DVD and my Girlfriend at the time (GatT) sat down and did comparisons. The difference is night and day. One track in particular that was just acoustic guitar and vocal, my GF said it sounded like someone closing a sliding glass door in front of a live artist when we switched to the old Sony AVR. Of course the Sony said 125W and the HK only said 40W, but the HK is high current discreet amplification, so that's 40 Watts of High Current PER CHANNEL. The Sony tricks you with its big number, as the small print says 140W ALL CHANNELS DRIVEN. The Sony weighs about 14 pounds while the HK clocks in at 53 pounds, and they are supposed to serve the exact same purpose, technically.

My point is: if one is going to be an HD-Discophile, eeking out that last few percent from their sources, they must also be an audiophile with top quality gear, or your source is getting degraded.

And that's the point I've been making. If you want to squeeze every oozing drop of perfection out of you system you need a format that can give it to you. Blu-Ray is the only format that can do that, as of right now. So like, there's still quite a large audience out there for these discs.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Good job I've got a discreet system then.

I'll agree with you that the difference is night and day, having also owned one of those all-in-one sound systems but it's all relative. You'll still get good sound (compared to the TV speakers) from your SD receiver albiet no better than DVD audio but is 'picture: better, sound:the same' such a turn off? It did me fine for a few years before I got my Onkyo.

Fair point. I was definitely building my system for top quality when i started it a few years ago, but I must say the streams look damn good and the audio does come through 5.1 and sounds good. I know if I hooked up a BR player to my system it would just own, but again, that's a big investment for me, not really for the player, but monies spent after I had it building a media library, one I think isn't necessary these days.

This is a big concept, and one I happen to be studying right now, and Matt is too, but from a different angle I think. Expectations, normalizing, and mediation into new societal norms.

You are completely correct on that. My lil 13 inch TV hooked up to Boom Box speakers in the 80s used to do me just fine...

Two weeks ago, when i got my TV, I popped in a SD DVD and decided they looked just fine. It was getting up-sampled to a good resolution, sounded good, and we watched a few titles happily. I've been watching HD content for two weeks...now the SD DVDs look terrible to me. No contrast, soft image... I've been normalized out of SD content pretty fast...

Y'know what I'd do if I were you?

Spend £30 on the Xbox HDDVD player and a copy of Blade Runner: The Final Cut

The player has its limitations - It can't cope with 24Hz or HD audio (but will downscale said audio to maximum bandwidth DTS) but it will be enough...

A lot of people get the wrong end of the stick about upscaling because your TV will upscale on its own - If it didn't a DVD with 480 vertical lines would look mighty small on a TV with 1080. Upscaling players generally do the job better, though, but I had a cheap one once which was actually worse.

EDIT - From what I remember, my old Xbox wasn't great in that regard. The PS3 is excellent and I tried a DVD in my new Xbox the other night and it looked much better than in the Pro. Then again I've changed TVs since then so it might be exactly the same.

Finally got round to trying to sort my TV out.

Me: Yeah, here's the problem ...

Call Centre bloke: Weird, never heard of that

Me: Well, it's a problem

Call Centre bloke: I can book it into our repair centre but if they find nothing wrong they'll send it straight back and you'll be without a TV for 2 weeks

Me: Can't you send an engineer out? That way I can show him what's wrong

Call Centre Bloke: Yeah, we could do that if you want

Me: *approaching end of proverbial tether* Please do that then

Call Centre Bloke: It'll be sometime on Thursday. They're supposed to ring you to tell you the time they're coming but they don't always remember.

Me: What-ev-er

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There's definitely something to be said for paying a few quid more at a local, independently owned store just for aftercare alone. Thing is, the TVs in my local independent store were 50% more expensive so considerably more than a few quid dearer.

What's the betting they find nothing wrong?

I think I am around 3 weeks in on my TV, and have put maybe...100-125 hours on it. So far, it's just blown us away. We watched 7 films and a bunch of TV episodes over the past few days, and it all looked stellar. Even 4:3 Twin Peaks in SD made us feel like we were seeing the show for the first time (especially since it IS the first time for Lisa ) Gaming is awesome and we have yet to run into any issues with the panel.

(sigh) My parents have two HDTVs now and keep giving us their old CRTs every time they upgrade. And their "old" TVs are fairly new and in great shape so we're using them and would feel guilty to upgrade to flat-panels just because. (sigh) But I also know we'd be able to rearrange the whole layout of the living room if we upgraded, so I'm torn in both directions.

You should go through a local thrift store sometime and see all the tube-TVs that people have given up, that they're now trying to sell. The same thrift stores that had maybe 1-2 old TVs in them years ago now routinely have 20-25 TVs (some quite large) for very little money. Nobody wants 'em.

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Have you tried Game Mode? As far as I can tell it's meant to improve response time by turning off all the junk image enhancement stuff. Can't see any difference on mine because I've turned those things off by default but my old Sammy forced edge enhancement during game mode and made things look horrible.

Don't think a few milliseconds improvement will do much for old Arthritic Thumbs here.

Those preset modes are generally quite weird. I've calibrated mine to my satisfaction but when I watch anything on my folks' TV it feels like I'm getting sunburned. Stepdad likes Sports Mode which turns everything up to 11, like a store display.

Well, the content companies aren't helping. We upgraded because we got a couple of X-box games that clearly stated "Some text may not be readable in SD formats", and they weren't kidding! LT doesn't have the best eyesight in the world, so it was a big issue for her.

Seds, I hear you! I have a little HDTV in my office (15"), which I got for about $100 right after Christmas, just so I could borrow my son's PS3 to play Heavy Rain -- which required an HDMI cable and HDTV. I'd wanted a tiny office TV upgrade anyway, but I was irked to find out I had to do it immediately if I wanted to play that game at all.

Which, as it turns out, wasn't really much like a game at all.

Re: Heavy Rain : "A deeply moving adventure that adapts to your every action - not to be missed! 8.5/10"

You didn't care for it? Seems to be pretty well reviewed across the board. I played Alan Wake (seems similar) on the X-box, which I loved, but I don't own a PS3, so I had to skip Heavy Rain. My friends that played it all loved it. *shrugs*

RE: Game Mode - I've seen references to it, I've seen people complain about it, and apparently, my TV has it, but I can't for the life of me find it on the remote or in config menu. *Shrugs again* Games look amazing, so I guess I am not missing much.

Seds, I literally gave it back to my son without having finished it (Heavy Rain) because it was more like an interactive movie and never felt like a game. It was entirely linear (ugh) and, despite the fact that FPS games freak me out because I'm hyper-sensitive to constantly worrying that I'm going to die-die-die in a game ... THIS game never once made me feel anything was in jeopardy. I just kept fighting or kicking or punching (or walking around picking things up like teddy bears) until I either won or lost, which didn't seem to matter anyway.

I may pick it up again someday but I felt bad keeping my son's PS3 in my house so long when I couldn't muster the excitement to play it for more than an hour at a time. I don't know if any of that was using a 15" TV to play on, but I've played enough computer games on smallish screens over the years to think that wasn't the issue for me.

I watched my son play Alan Wake (since they nixed the computer version, which peeved me to no end) and I can say that Heavy Rain was very different. Alan Wake at least felt like a typical game rather than a soap-opera-y movie with different scene endings.

Just my two cents. Perhaps a cool home theater setup would have made the experience more exciting for me.

Nah, those complaints sound pretty valid to me. I like the "playing a movie" thing, but only if it's interspersed with lots of fun action!

It just wasn't a great movie (put it this way - If it were an actual film it'd have been straight-to-DVD) you were playing - That's my thoughts on Heavy Rain.

If they'd hired Bioware's writers and had some better voice actors it might have been different...

About the text size thing: That was definitely one of the things which tipped me over the edge into HD. A couple of games came out around the same time (Burnout Paradise and GTA4, I think) and I just couldn't read the map on my old set.

For us, it was the Codex, Journal, and Conversation wheels in MEII that had Lisa in fits. She is close to finishing the Paragon run she was on. She has completed most of the crew stuff and is about to retrieve the Reaper IFF.

@Chris: 80 hours! You gamer, you!

HDTV repair newz!

I've just had an engineer looking at my set and, thankfully, he saw the problem immediately, though said he'd never encountered it before.

Amazingly, these things only have 3 parts - Panel, power supply and inverter (for the current)

He changed the inverter which made things worse, then the power supply which improved things a bit but not to his or my satisfaction. New panel then - fitted on Monday.

Perhaps one day I'll buy a main TV which causes me no problems:

Cheap Orion set died after 10 months
Good Samsung set developed loads of dead pixels after 6 days
And now this LG with its faulty panel

I've got a 19" 720p set in the bedroom which cost me £100, is a brand I've never heard of and has been running like a Swiss watch for years.