It's been a lifetime, as I've never been to confession before. What brings me in now? Murder someone? Inspirational new Pope? Use the Lords name in vain numerous, numerous times in creative combination with other four-letter words?
Yup. That one.
My original sin? I've not kept up with HT technology. I use my Axioms to watch TV 95% of the time, watch a B-D disc the other 5% and listen to music 0%. I used to love my HT and listening to music. Then life got in the way, and I fell behind on the technology that seemingly changed every four days. Oh, and there's the square room issue that has laughed and thrown up a middle finger at me, Exorcist-style, every time I've tried to tweak things. At some point, I gave up.
My receiver did a re-set during a power storm about six months ago, despite a couple of layers of AC protection. It took me two months to re-name the input labels and I still haven’t even “set it up” with the included Audyssey.
I bought a Harmony One remote about a year and a half ago. It’s still in its box.
I bought
Wish You Were Here on multi-channel two years ago and now
The Endless River on B-D Multi-Channel. I even have
Moving Pictures on Multi-channel B-D disc. Never listened to any of them.
I have a couple of Pixar 3D discs that are kind of fun to pop in when my niece and nephew visit. I have to hook up the Pannie player directly to the TV on an occasion to watch them, and then I lose out on the quality of the soundtrack.
I’m not kidding; I really kind of gave up on the whole HT thing. No time. And the longer you put it off, the further behinder you get, you know?
All of you, disciples of great sound... I lay my burden at your feet and ask forgiveness. I come to you selfishly to avoid researching this crap myself.
I have a Denon 3808 receiver and a Pannie DMP-BD35 B-D player. According to the
Pannie manual chart, it should play any aforementioned disc. But my receiver can’t decode the better soundtracks.
I also have a good number of SACD and DVD-A discs that I can currently play through an old Oppo player with multi-channel analog audio outs into the multi-channel audio inputs on the receiver.
I’ve read
this from Alan (thanks Alan!) and I BELIEVE that if I get a new receiver, a simple HDMI connection between my B-D player and a new receiver will decode everything except the DVD-A and SACD discs, as the Pannie player won’t play them.
You’re figuring out where this is going, huh?
I noted that a receiver I had looked into getting 6 months ago has dropped to close of half of its original price:
Denon AVR-X4000. A newer model has come out with Atmos (as long as I’m in this crappy square listening environment, 5.1 is fine by me and I’m not interested in Atmos). The receiver seems to be a great price and is very well reviewed. I’m tempted to jump.
I think the only feature that it doesn’t have that would be on my wishlist could be analog inputs to enable me to play those SACD and DVD-A discs out of my Oppo. This is because I BELIEVE that in the early stages of SACD/DVD-A discs, copy-protection didn’t allow the sound to be passed via HDMI, only analog (am I remembering that correctly?). Of course, I could also replace both of those players with a
current Oppo that would allow all the higher level B-D soundtracks, DVD-A/SACD to pass through a simple HDMI connection to the new receiver for decoding.
Am I off track here?
A “current” receiver accepts Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-Master and all the PCM flavors and every type of track from SACD/DVD-A via HDMI?
Honestly, I hate all this upgrading now. It’s not exciting for me anymore because I have other things that need my attention; it’s a pain in the ass. I want to throw money at the problem and be current. Maybe not the new Oppo just yet, but if a new receiver gets me everything except the DVD-A and SACD discs, it might be worth jumping.
That last statement should maybe be read like a question.
