I am redoing my home theater setup. And it is a right royal mess.

The equipment has been bought over the past six years and the oldest pieces are the AV Receiver and the Speakers. The speakers are okay (one of them is showing some signs of problems) by and large: these are Mission’s M5 set of small satellites and sub-woofer. The receiver is a now aged Yamaha RX-V540. It works well, too well to get rid of in fact. The problem is that it was designed for the last generation of a/v equipment.

For starters, it does not support HDMI. So my DVD Player and the PS3 cannot go through it. It supports component cables (two sets only) and that takes care of the Wii. Lots of composite connectors, but only the satellite television box uses composite now.

Fortunately my TV has two HDMI inputs. This Philips unit also has an SPDIF out, which I can route back to the receiver. So for HI-Def playback, my TV is the a/v receiver and the receiver acts only as an audio decoder-amplifier. The fact that the receiver does not do any kind of upscaling means that the TV input cannot be fixed. For each source the TV has to be set apart from the receiver. This is sub-optimal and is not the way it should be. Till a year or so ago, this worked well as I didn’t have either HDMI source.

So the question is, what is to be done? The new generation of receivers from the likes of Onkyo, Denon and Sony promise upscaling, HDMI 1.4 support and so on. But many of these will hit the market only in the coming months. I guess the best option is to wait it out. Buying a receiver when many technologies are in the cusp of change is probably not the best thing to do.

Talking about HDMI 1.4, it has support for 3D video. I believe this calls for the use of special glasses to view the content. Why should this be the case? Is it not possible for the TV to trick us into thinking we are viewing three dimensional images? There is a demo 3D TV at the local mall which seems to do that reasonably well. I wonder if 3D video technology will finally deliver motion sickness to armchair travelers!

Link of the day is once again xkcd:

Single Ladies