I have been reading a lot lately...now that its time for a new setup. I am so utterly confused by all these options that the industry keeps throwing at us. Basically you will never be done purchasing equipment for a home theater...simply because a new standard is out and ooooh we gotta upgrade. I guess this is a simple economics type theory...

My question here is...are any of you buying audio gear based on the new HDMI inputs? I personally have just bought a HK AVR7300 and it does component up conversion up to 780p/1080i....so I am thrilled as it is. But now I have myself thinking if I should have waited for the new models with hdmi (which doesnt yet have a firm standard in place).

What do ya'all think?

Depends on how long you were willing to wait, I guess. There's an argument that even if you have a digital feed to the TV at the native resolution of the TV display the TV needs to resample the signal anyways in order to make it line up exactly. I have no idea if this is true but if so it makes me question whether jumping to a digital feed today is going to buy us very much.

In my (admittedly ignorant in this area) personal opinion we will need to go through two generations of "fully digital" before the industry settles down.

Right now we have TVs, receivers and players which all are designed to resample and rescale as needed to mix and match with other equipment. We need to get to the point where there is some agreement on where in the chain all that stuff goes, so that either TVs can become little more than fixed frequency monitors, or players can just play at their native resolution, or receivers don't have to do all the mixing and matching.

I don't think the next generation is going to be "the one", if only because there doesn't seem to be an obvious answer re: where the redundant processing should be taken out.

I would enjoy my component system and not worry about it.

Tarun,

You'd wait forever for the perfect receiver/prepro. Like my pm to you. Buy those amps and accept that the new prepro will have to change every few years or when you change TVs or projectors. Amps, then next whatever HD DVD we have to buy, then a new prepro down the road.

I think that the "heart" of the issue is where do you do the scaling? In the DVD player, receiver/ pre processor, or in the TV?

There are many and varied opinions.

I think that it will take a while to sort out.

I think that is the plan....buy some external amps and upgrade the pre-processing side as per need based on future standards. For now I will just use my receiver and my new axioms (1 month)...then its pay down the debt time and finally buy Outlaw's (if necessary) in the near future.

Thanks All!
-Tarun

Rat,

I don't have to do anything until the plasma fails. Hopefully after the full 90,000 hours. My son and I are waiting for the 1080 dlp's to hit the market. He lives in ABQ, NM and is ready to buy.

Well as you can see the industry will be going towards HDMI. The major (and possibly ONLY) reason its going in this direction is for copy-protection. Before entering my foray in home theaters I did some reading and basically found that HDMI/DVI aren't drastically superior to component. Blue Jeans has an excellent article here.
Some good info in that article such as once digital data is lost, its gone forever.

HDMI is also preferred vs DVI since it sends both the video and audio signal over wire whereas DVI is only the video feed. The industry can now place copy restriction on HDMI connections to prevent perfect HiDef digital copies. For now I am content with component but will eventually use HDMI since its less cable clutter in the back of my setup.

I believe HDCP also applies equally to DVI, not just HDMI. The 1.0 HDCP spec was DVI-only, while the 1.1 HDCP spec added HDMI.

http://www.axiomaudio.com/archives/dvdi_hdmi.html

http://www.axiomaudio.com/archives/dvdi_hdmi.html

Link police

That article "reads" a lot like the one on the BlueJeans website whose link was posted somewhere on this board.

Interesting!

My Sony plasma has a DB15 pin connector. I have a component conversion cable. Makes you wonder what Sony was thinking for this monitor. It is an easy connection for the computer for a big display.

I won't be making any change for a while.