Comments on: Dead to Me: The A/V Receiver

By: psu

psu — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:47:52 +0000

Oppo now makes a 3×1 HDMI switch box.

Of course, HDMI switching is useless since you need a receiver to do with audio decode and crap, and only the really expensive ones will decode off an HDMI input. So everything still sucks.

By: r.

r. — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:35:01 +0000

BTW I think what the world needs is a decent HDMI switcher. Its nice that HDMI packs all the a/v streams into one cable, but there aren’t any receivers that offer it as a clean end-to-end solution yet.

By: r.

r. — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:32:22 +0000

If you want your speaker cable pre-measured, cut to length and expensive, it does =)

By: psu

psu — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:35:34 +0000

It’s further proof that the industry hates me that speaker wire does not come with the plugs already attached.

By: Damien Neil

Damien Neil — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 05:24:26 +0000

Did I forget to mention that the single worst consumer electronics user experience in the entire universe is hooking speaker wire into those retarded binding posts on the back of a receiver? Surely someone in the last fifty years could have thought up a better way to do this.

They have: Banana plugs. Attach them to the speaker wires, and then they just plug right into the back of the receiver.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 01:37:24 +0000

1) computer networking is ‘simpler’ because standards exist for connectors and machine to machine communication.
2) often stereo connect/disconnect/rearrange/fiddle would benefit from the datacenter model: everything is 3ft from any wall and chest-height.

Of course for 2 your room asthetics would suffer And 1 would mean that all of the stereo and ‘military industrial complex’ that surrounds (pun intended) the stereo world would have to give up some high-dollar profits…

But yea, working on stereo blows, point taken.

By: Mark Denovich

Mark Denovich — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 22:46:40 +0000

As I sat on my couch, dB meter in hand calibrating the output of my 6.1 surround system, I thought to myself “how many end customers have ever managed to setup their system properly?”

I imagine that percentage is pretty damn low. I think we need something along the lines of USB. Plug it in, let it identify/configure itself (mapping input/outputs to buttons automatically), let me use hubs to get more ports if necessary, and power over the cable would be nice too. HMDI seems to have impressive bandwidth specs, but it’s still pretty damn dumb. Lame.

By: psu

psu — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:27:51 +0000

Of course, because I’m a snob I don’t want those crappy speakers. Oh well.

By: psu

psu — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:19:13 +0000

Hey that’s pretty close! I didn’t think to look at the computer people.

By: Ysabel

Ysabel — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:13:42 +0000

I decided that what the world needs is a simple and cheap surround processor/amplifier that takes a digital input or two and puts out 5.1. I have a little Logitech 5.1 amplifier that does exactly this.