Confusion cleared: How the heck do you hookup this home theater system?

What goes where?

The Input and Output Panels explained.

And why you should turn off your built in speakers and never let them sway your purchase choice.

VIDEO

The video feed may come from an antenna, a satellite dish-fed box, or cable (direct to the display, or to a tuner, or to a receiver, or to a scaler, or to a cable set-top box.) If you plan to use the tuner in your VCR to get the channels to a HDTV MONITOR that by definition can not receive TV by itself, that's not a great idea. You are almost sure to lose picture quality in a big way.

Now here’s the big deal:

If you convert from one resolution to another and then another, in each step of the process, you risk picture degradation as you go, as each box will do it differently and probably not as good as every link in the chain, so the weak link is just that – what you will see. Safe to say, the more conversions, the odds are your picture quality will go down.

One of the reasons CableCard is so attractive is because you avoid conversions in a cable set-top box (which might not be built for true HDTV.)

If you have an outboard DVR (aka PVR) aka (TiVo) – a digital video recorder, you'll need to get the video to that too. And then the video must return from that back to either your receiver or directly into your display screen.

Your DVD player or VCR will also send their video to your receiver or display.

I say VIDEO, but audio will travel with it, though it might go in another direction (into another piece of gear) as you hook it up for surround sound.

You’ll need to check for how many inputs your display has and what kind. If HDTV, there should be a DVI (older) or HDMI (newer) plus other options. HDMI is your preferred hookup, because that’s the way the world is going. But I haven’t heard of many sets that have more than a few of these, so you might end up using several types of connections to hookup everything INTO your display. In HDMI the audio travels with the video.

Of course, that’s another advantage to the receiver – you hookup everything (video and audio sources) to THAT, and the receiver then feeds the Display device and speakers. HOWEVER, if the receiver is the weak link...

And some receivers only 'do' audio. Which is fine as far as they go. They will have the processing and amplifiers to drive your surround sound speakers, but not do picture switching. Others will. See why this is confusing?

The better receivers will switch between sources, but your channel change will be at the display or at the set top box.

You can also route some of your video devices to the display and not the receiver if you wish. Why? Don't know.

A note about channel changing

So it looks like you are going to have a remote for your Display, your Receiver, your DVD player, your VCR, your set top box. (See accessories, Universal Remote) I must say, the Harmony remote looks to be the solution! It should do EVERYTHING for you, and promises easy set-up via the web.

AUDIO

You will need to have wires to get to each speaker. Each wire, except the subwoofer, is a pair of conductors. One side of the pair will have a little ridge on the jacket or somehow look slightly different from the other side. The object is to keep all the same sides into the same sides of the speaker connectors – think RIB to RED or RIGHT terminal. If you get this wrong, imaging and bass can suffer. The subwoofer hookup will take an INTERCONNECT which isn’t a speaker wire, but a coaxial wire. These various types are pictured here. I don’t think you can hook this up wrong.

The 5 speaker wires will come from your receiver, (or amplifiers, if you have outboard/separate amps.) If you have either, you will turn off the Display’s speakers as they'll confuse or smear the sound and won't have the quality of your other speakers. Your receiver will have the amplifiers for everything but the subwoofer, which will have its own.

Now how that audio gets to the receiver could be interesting.

Hopefully, your rig will allow you to hookup from Satellite or cable box to the receiver – or – to the Display (let's say you have CableCard) then back out of the display to the receiver.

Are usually not very good. I sure wouldn’t choose one HDTV set over another because it had more speakers in it, because for most Home Entertainment systems, you’ll have dedicated OUTBOARD speakers hookups elsewhere in the room. Maybe a lot of them. You won’t use those in your set at that time.

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