yakk0.org a blog on technology in the real world

Presented in glorious surround sound

My wife and I have been without surround sound since we got our HDTV last year. When I first got into home theater sound systems I got a "home theater in a box" kit with a receiver that was also a 5-disc DVD changer. Because we now had a HDTV, I wanted to have the best visual appearance for our DVDs and got an upconverting DVD player. The problem was that the DVD player wouldn't connect to the receiver, which makes sense...why would you have a standalone DVD player when you have 5 built-in? Another problem was the audio from our TivoHD. The old receiver had no HDMI inputs. Because of this, we pretty much only used the receiver for listening to radio. Around the time we moved the DVD player in the unit completely died, so it didn't make the move with us. We have been using just the speakers in the TV since, and it's been a good experience. I really wanted a new receiver though. Not only for the audio, but I wanted a good HDMI switcher and upconverter for my non-HD stuff. Thanks to my newly employed status and our tax refund I'm now the owner of a Onkyo TX-SR806 Receiver.

I decided on the Onkyo based on good reviews online, its features, and its price. I almost got the 706, but figured that I'm going to have this for a while, so it would be worth it to get the extra ports. Amazon also had it for almost $300 off, which helped. Set up was a breeze. The unit has a setup microphone that detects tones from the speakers to calibrate. As soon as you plug in the microphone you get a menu for the calibration. That's a nice touch, I was fumbling through the menus before I discovered that all I had to do was plug it in. I still only have 5.1 speakers from my previous system and the receiver showed that as my setup after the audio setup was completed.

Right now we only have our TivoHD set up through HDMI. I found that after using a HDMI cable to go from my TV to the receiver I didn't have enough cables for all my devices (I was already one short). I should have some coming from Monoprice soon, and have used the component cables from my DVD player on my AppleTV. There was some sync issues with that and I had to adjust the settings to get the audio and video coming through together on that. I don't know if it was the component cables or something else. I didn't have that problem with HDMI and my Tivo. My eventual setup will have my Tivo, AppleTV, and DVD player all using HDMI and my Wii using component so I'm not too worried about it.

It's been set up for over 24 hours and so far I'm happy with my purchase. I still have some things to figure out but it looks like it'll be a perfect fit in my entertainment center.