Hello Martin On 25 Apr 2012, at 15:44, Martin McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
• Firstly, the thought of Gordon being able to come home is the best news. Definitely! I'll post more about that on Just Chat. • I think what you are going to find as far as the surround sound world is probably going to be that of too much information and too many choices but that is always better than game over; Go home. Absolutely; I couldn't agree more. We used to have one of those machines way back when my parents and sister were alive. But it went the journey a long time ago and in any event, it wouldn't work with our modern equipment. • You mentioned wireless speakers which should be a great thing, but be careful of one thing. If you have a mixture of wireless and wired, stay away from digital/bluetooth/similar technology for the wireless speakers because there will be a delay and even a delay of a few thousandths of a second will be noticeable and you will hate it immediately. Yes, we have a couple of audio devices which all exhibit that behaviour. But no; I wouldn't be thinking of mixing the two and if I do go for wireless it won't be BlueTooth. • If there will be a mixture of wireless and wired speakers, use an analog wireless system as there will be no delay and well-designed and properly installed analog wireless should work as well as wired speakers. I've been advised by my brother not to mix the two systems because he reckons you're always going to be prone to problems. • You could also have a wireless surround sound system for all your 5.1 channels. Remember, the .1 channel is the subwoofer so that all those explosions and natural disasters come out sounding like you are actually there. Yes; that's the way I'm thinking. it would be better in lots of ways, primary of which is my desire not to have wires trailing all over the place, and also to have the same connectivity and quality for all of the speakers. Just one query there though; I was under the impression that 7.1 was the latest and current standard rather than 5.1. What I was wondering also was whether we could get hold of a Superaudio CD player and hook that up also. I'm thinking along the lines of connecting as much of this stuff digitally as possible. • You normally do turn the volume all the way down on the TV and the HDMI signal contains all the audio information multiplexed with the video so the TV may either have outputs for each channel or it may have a digital stream you can feed in to your audio system so its decoder can give you the 5 channels and subwoofer. I'm just looking at the menus of our TV actually and there's a section here which deals with the configuration of the TV for surround sound receivers. The first option in the menu says "Should the TV's internal audio system be automatically disabled when a digital connection is detected?". So by the looks of things, that answers my question; sorry about that. I should probably have picked up this remote and gone into the menu system first. It also offers different sampling rates but I cannot adjust them because it seems that the control options are only available if a surround sound receiver is present. • As usual, the user interface is going to be the biggest pain in the back side. Most of them will probably be GUI-based rubbish but if there is an iPhone app, that might save the day so I wouldn't give up on something until I was sure the iPhone app was also rubbish. Absolutely. Whilst it would be preferable that the entire machine is accessible, in the case of Gordon it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem anyway because he always has willing eyes ready to assist where required. • We have a Sony Bravia TV which, I am sure, has a UK counterpart and the HDMI interface is great because the sound just works as soon as the signal is acquired. Yes, our TV works like that. As soon as a signal is detected on any of the 4 HDMI inputs, the 2 Scart inputs, the SVideo and optical audio inputs or the component video inputs and TosLink inputs, the input or inputs are automatically selected as the active one. When the signal disappears the antenna is re-selected. This TV is a Sony HD/3D 60 inch plasma TV. • So, it really doesn't matter if your program source is DVD, satellite decoder or off-the-air, the HDMI signal has it all and all you need is the proper decoders to pick off the audio and video. As I said earlier the TV here has a whole menu dedicated to options which apply when an external device is active. So I'd imagine that once those parameters are set you're good to go. I have just tried to changed the behaviour of the TV when a surround sound receiver is connected but it won't allow me to do that unless the decoder is active. • There is probably nothing else of a general nature I can tell you that is of any help except that some people buy a nice surround-sound receiver that can handle multiple audio and video sources and then use a monitor rather than a full TV for their video and switch the inputs through the receiver so that the surround-sound system audio is used for everything from computers to a phonograph for those who still have those hooked up. We'd need about 3 sources or maybe even just 2. Then the TV as well. We don't need a really top of the range model; volume isn't the issue as long as the quality is good. • You already have a television set so the only thing you will do is to turn its volume all the way down and the Mute feature may not work for muting the surround-sound system. Again you can programme the TV to do that automatically it seems. • Oh yes; Be on the lookout for the law of diminishing returns.:-) A twelve-thousand-Dollar system doesn't sound twelve times better than a 1-thousand-Dollar system. If you don't like the interface or you can't get it to work without a maintenance staff with on-site technical support, it isn't worth all that. Absolutely right. Lynne ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. 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