Rats nest

When we tried to watch a movie on our big, drop-down screen the other night we realized that the old Denon receiver that has been at the heart of our ‘home theater” system for many years must finally be replaced- it no longer switches video correctly, and the audio cuts out every 20 minutes and the whole thing has to be turned on and off to get it working again.

So, off to Amazon to order a replacement. I picked a fairly cheap Pioneer unit (only 5.1, instead of the old one which was 7.1, but it sounds very good and I’m still using the extra surround speakers to widen the sound out at the back) that has multiple HDMI inputs, and decided to add a new, powered sub-woofer to the mix as well.

Boy- I love hooking up HDMI cables!

Here is the wiring behind the TV unit before-

Now, I will admit, I like to have everything hooked as flexibly as possible to everything else, but that’s ridiculous!

After hooking everything up to the new receiver using mostly HDMI cables, but still some component and composite to feed the projector and the DVD recorder- and the VCR (yes, I hooked it in so we can finally transfer our old stuff to DVD), here are all the cables that I had left over from the old set-up-

So, it’s all hooked up and working, Jackie’s and my remotes are programmed , and it looks so much cleaner 🙂

Now I just have to enter in all the speaker distances, set the individual channel levels with the cool SPL meter app I found for my phone, and play around with the cross-over frequency for the new sub, but that’s a job for tomorrow…