Since I upgraded the front projector in my primary theater room to the new Epson 1080UB, I haven’t had a fully functional home theater. Why is that you ask? HDMI! This projector won’t play with my Denon AVR-5805. Or more accurately my AVR-5805 won’t play with this projector since I tested the Epson on newer Denon receivers and their flagship pre/pros as well as other brands of receivers that are HDMI 1.3 compliant and had no operational issues at all. Apparently the HDMI 1.1 capabilities of the venerable AVR-5805 render it useless in this case. Read more…
Pretend for a moment you’re a customer. You just laid down your whole tax return on a new receiver or processor armed with the latest in THX post processing, Surround decoding and room correction. You operate with the idea that you will have limitless power and ungodly good audio. You take the system home, set it all up. It sounds great…. until you attempt to turn the volume up and the pre/pro wont allow it due to a limitation in the volume control. Read more…
I am sitting here beside myself as I come to the realization that my entire reference system has been taken down by a projector. That’s right! Today Clint came by to setup my new Epson 1080UB projector so I could bask in 1080p glory. After the installation was completed, we struggled to get video to the projector from any source (ie. DVD player, HD DVD player, Xbox 360). After lunch we turned the system on and were happy to see XBOX 360 working via component video. Clint enjoyed a brief jam session in guitar hero until I decided it was a good idea to try another video source. Little to our knowledge this would be the end of my reference system as we knew it. The room went black and after a moment of dead silence, erupted a few NY Italian colorful metaphors out of my mouth. After bypassing my venerable Denon AVR-5805 receiver, we successfully passed video to the projector. Read more…
Living in sunny Florida has its advantages – excessive heat & humidty, overcrowded strip malls, and plenty of contractors to rip you off in the “Florida is the right to work state” kind of mentality I’ve come accustomed to living here for the past 20 years. Ok but seriously, we do have awesome beaches… that, if I am lucky, I get to visit 2-3 times / year. Oh and Disney too. Yea, ya gotta love Disney – the rides.. the crowds, the theme songs….the crowds, the fire works…the crowds.
Before singing Florida’s praises too much, let me also remind you that it’s the lightening capital of the world. With that, we get some pretty fierce storms which as you could imagine often lead to power outages, surges, etc. This is one of the reasons I am so adamant about using quality UL certified power conditioners to protect your home theater equipment. Read more…
I often get bombarded with snake oil from some esoteric audio manufacturers (usually cable vendors). You gotta love this for two reasons: 1. debunking this nonsense is at the very core of why I started Audioholics nearly a decade ago. 2. It keeps your skills sharp making you think of how many different ways a misguided manufacturer can rape and pillage sound engineering principles in efforts to gain a selling point advantage. Read more…
