Monday, August 23, 2010

Update; Home Theatre work to be done

It's been soooo long since I last posted on here I feel ashamed of myself.

Joyce and I are trying to get our house in some kind of order... our big project right now (aside from raising that little bugger named Mr. Bean) is the Home Theatre in our basement.

The basement itself is almost finished, with only carpeting left (we're waiting on this guy to come back from vacation). What we've got downstairs right now is this:

LG 47" LCD TV
Denon AVR-790 630W 7.1 receiver
Klipsch F1 Synergy 5.1 speakers+subwoofer
Xbox 360
Sony BDP-S550 Bluray player
VSonic all-region DVD player
Telus internet wireless router
Telus TV box
Acer Athlon 64 x2 desktop PC w/ Radeon HD 4870
Old Athlon desktop PC (for karaoke)
LG 19" LCD monitor (for karaoke)
Pair of Yorkville powered studio monitors (for karaoke)
Mackie ProFX8 mixer (ordered, on the way - for karaoke)

The plan is to hook everything (except karaoke components) up through the Denon receiver, which is of course outputting to the Klipsch speakers.

Xbox 360 -> Denon = HDMI
Bluray -> Denon = HDMI
Telus TV -> Denon = HDMI
Acer PC -> Denon = HDMI + 5.1 analog or Toslink
DVD -> Denon = Component
Denon -> TV = HDMI

For karaoke, we'll hook up the following:

Old PC -> TV = VGA
Old PC -> 19" monitor = DVI
Old PC -> ProFX8 = Mini stereo to L/R RCA
ProFX8 -> Studio monitors = 1/4"

That's about the gist.

The 47" TV will be wall-mounted (tiltable), with the center speaker sitting on a wall-shelf under the TV, and the subwoofer below that. The Yorkville studio monitors will sit on either side of the center speaker on the wall-shelf.

The 19" monitor will be wall-mounted (full-motion) around the top-right corner of the room and be tilted down and in. It's basically for picking songs for karaoke.

All other components will sit on a custom-made 48"x20"x18" shelf in the corner, with 5 compartments plus the top of the shelf.

I'm still undecided over the audio output from the Acer PC to the Denon receiver. I can choose between 5.1 analog out from the SoundBlaster card I rip out of the Old PC, or the Toslink from the onboard audio. I'm not sure if I can do both simultaneously. Toslink would allow me to play DVD's and such on the Acer PC, ensuring that the audio is decoded by the receiver.

But games won't output audio by Toslink. In which case, I could either use the 5.1 out from the onboard sound, or stick the SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS into the Acer PC. I'm still under the impression that the Audigy 2 ZS has internal Dolby Digital and DTS decoders... so I'm hoping for the best.

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