Home theater surround on the cheap.
So, due to a nice tax return prepared by yours truly, my hubby was able to afford a shiny new big screen LCD TV. Feeling like I must contribute in some way, I went through a few test trials to provide the “sound” part of our new “home theater.” First up was a 5.1 theater system by Panasonic that had a 5 DVD changer, a Dolby / DTS surround decoder, and 5.1 speakers (2 front, 2 back, one center, and a crappy subwoofer). Cost was $300. We hooked that up to our Media Center PC via optical audio cable (toslink) to get what I thought would be best quality digital audio. Turns out there were limitations. For one, we would ONLY get full 5.1 surround if the audio source was AC3 (Dolby) or DTS, meaning true surround only kicked in when watching DVDs or 6 channel encoded BlueRay rips. To the PC it looked like we only had 2 speaker stereo, so games were limited to 2 speakers (no 4 speaker), and 5.1 surround WMAs didn’t work at all. Also I found out that what I thought was a fancy high-tech digital optical audio connection was an old system that could only support 2 channels uncompressed, had to compress 5.1 audio to fit it through the digital bottleneck (degrading the quality). Worse, toslink doesn’t support 7.1 audio, which is what comes on modern BlueRay disks. So, that went back to the store. Second setup we tried, and are sticking to, is essentially a whole bunch of stereo PC speakers hooked up to every “OUT” port in our sound card. I bought a new THX certified PC stereo speaker setup with a huge subwoofer (Logitech, $130), which we hooked up to the analog front speaker port. Then hubby brought a bunch of old stereo PC speakers from work (Creative Labs, freebies), and we used those to fill in the ports for center channel, rear speaker channel, and one we get the cables, will use the remaining audio card port for the last 2 of the 7 speaker set-up. So, instead of spending $300 for fancy Dolby decoder amp with speakers, I spent $130 on a REALLY nice set of front stereos with subwoofer, and a bunch of stereo freebies to fill out the rest of the surround setup. After all, the PC can decode Dolby and DTS in software, so there’s really no need for anything other than just plain speakers. Results are firkin amazing. Just watching plain TV sounds way different, and in some cases a bit exaggerated (base and surround), compared to what it used to be.
Regarding other stuff in my life, work is getting very complicated, kendo is still kicking my butt stamina-wise, I still don’t have the strength to cut and stop properly in Iaido, but am working on it, and this August trip to Italy is still a go.