AV Rant #229: Robcast
Something tells me I’ve named a podcast this before. Oh well. To all of you that spammed me with the article about cassettes making a comeback, the first thing Liz and I did was kick ourselves afterwards for forgetting to mention it. We’ll do it next week. Tom has a new game he wants to play, but he’s too cheap to buy it. RIP Sidney Harman. Netflix + Facebook = Fail… at least to Tom and Liz. How old is your grandmother and does she have Super Wi-Fi? The results of the #twoll, an overview of budget receivers using the Denon AVR-1912 has a reference, and part 3 of the Home Theater Soup to Nuts series. This time, sources and upconversion. Once again, notes after the break. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to vote for us at Podcast Alley! To see our (mostly) complete collection of show videos, click here. To get our iPhone app, visit the iTunes store. Download Tom’s ebook Bob Moore: No Hero which is pretty much available everywhere.
Sources:
- If you’ve got good sources, you might be able to save money on your receiver
- Think about consolidating to a universal blu player
- An external scaler – it may be for you
- Do you need 3D? Streaming?
- Use the Internet to research performance and compatibility with universal remote solutions.
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Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, still catching-up but wanted to comment that Portal 2 is worth the $. I played the 1st one with my son on my lap helping me out when he was 4. So he has been excited for this one now that he is older and better understands the concept. IMO it is a good game to play with my son since it makes him think not just running around and jumping like other kids games, there is some dark humor but I think most of it goes over his head. You won’t regret buying it.
A few podcast ago you talked about your favorite apps. Here is my fav for my iPod Touch:
http://www.instapaper.com/iphone
Especially great for the touch and WiFi only iPad as you can save articles for reading when you don’t have internet access. I also use it to save and organize some of my favorite web articles.
I’m scared to listen…
Speaking of saving money on games, my 14-yr-old son and I are having a blast re-playing all the split-screen co-op missions in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 on original Xbox. We played it when he was 8 and had less patience…even now it challenges your mental endurance since it is a true hard-core shooter (no respawns, no checkpoint saves, no manual saves). But super-satisfying when you finish a mission with both players surviving!
Re: Budget AVRs with limited legacy connectivity I say “Bring it on”. It makes sense to strip out superfluous connectors and circuitry in pursuit of more value with the latest HDMI interfaces. I had 100% HDMI sources even before I had an HDMI receiver…composite, S-Video, component, and S/PDIF are fading fast so it’s not really that big a deal to reduce or eliminate those connections.
OK so I just hooked up my old Xbox via component and optical…good thing my AVR cross-converts to HDMI! 🙂
Sorry, Liz! I didn’t know you were trying to stay anonymous on Twitter!
You’ll be happy to know that you can blame the #twoll though. Only reason I found your Twitter handle was because I searched for @AVRant_Tom replies to see what other AVRant listeners were responding for the twoll!
Oh, twoll, you’ve given so much and yet caused so much strife…
😀
I think it’s a shame that you have to be the most careful about checking features and inputs on the lower priced receivers when the people shopping in that price range are often the least well-informed or new to the HT hobby!
It’s one reason why I quite like the new Onkyo TX-NR709. Even though its $900 MSRP (currently $800 street) price tag puts it above entry or budget level, it’s incredibly “complete” in terms of features and inputs. It’s got pre-outs if you wanna upgrade the amps. It’s got 7.1 analogue inputs, which are becoming really rare it seems. It’s got every kind of input and great Marvell QDeo video processing. It’s got the very capable Audyssey MultEQ XT auto setup. And it’s even got THX, which is also kind of rare at that price.
Now, it’s still Onkyo, so it remains to be seen if it will catch on fire (literally) or whether all of those features will actually work the way they’re supposed to! But just in terms of being very “safe” in the sense of having every kind of input and every feature you could possibly need, I don’t think any other under-$1000 receiver can quite match it, and that’s pretty impressive given the level of competition in this segment of the industry.
You mentioned the pain of having so many login names and passwords. Take a look at LastPass. You have to be ok with your creds being stored in “the cloud”, but if you are, you’ll love it.