Anyone know of a good standard reference manual for audio/video?

Sean

What sort of info are you looking for? There are so many areas to cover in home audio/video that I think you may be better off looking for books on specific topics.

On the general end of the spectrum, there's Home Theater for Dummies, but that's most likely beneath you. Practical Home Theater looks more promising.

On the specific end of the spectrum, there are books such as Master Handbook of Acoustics and The Audio Dictionary.

Hope that'll get you started.

Thanks Peter - it's a start. I am looking for a technical reference that not only covers things like home theater, dolby, dts, etc but covers some of the more technical details like impedence matching, acoustics (theory), standards for things like pre-amp outputs and so on. At the moment, I have access to a lot of different papers etc on the internet but it is time consuming to track down small details.

Something similar to a Mark's Standard Mechanical Handbook.

Sean

Robert Harley's Complete guide to high end audio is good. Some will disaree. but it covers alot of stuff, including room acoustics. and just about everything else. Not a ton on home theater though.

Try the top two listed here:

http://www.uhfmag.com/Books.html