Home Theater Upgrade

I watch a lot of TV and movies but I don't upgrade my home theater equipment very often. My TV was 11 years old. An expensive (at the time) Panasonic 42" Plasma TV. I had a Denon A/V receiver I got a couple of years later and a Panasonic DVD player. My TiVo was a Series 3, about 7 years old. I got my money out of the lifetime service option (I think I managed to transfer that over from a previous TiVo) but I did replace the hard drive once and it was starting to act up again (a few reboots and pauses).

There were some limitations. The TV and receiver didn't support HDMI connectors so everything was using component video and digital audio cables (I think all were optical). That was fine. I have a Wii and an AirPort Express to stream audio from my mac and iOS devices. But that meant I couldn't use an Apple TV or some other newer devices. Many blu-ray players now just have an HDMI connector. Also, while the TV was HD, it had a resolution of 1024x768 which meant the best it could do was 720p. Higher resolution 1080i and 1080p were beyond it.

So I was thinking of upgrading and then TiVo finally announced their new Roamio and I was interested. After my Series 3 then rebooted on its own, I ordered one then I started looking at home theater equipment reviews in The Wirecutter. I was very happy with their articles, picking the best device in a category and explaining the choices and selection process. I was thinking of buying some of their step-up choices but the more I researched the more I agreed with their best picks. So I ended up getting their picks for Best TV, Best A/V Receiver and Best Blu-ray Player. Here's some of my thinking.

The TV is clearly the best reviewed TV around (some say ever). There are even higher end ones, but this has a great picture for not crazy money. From Amazon I got the 50" version for $1000 (seven times less than I paid for a 42" plasma 11 years prior). I looked at their Best $500 TV choice but it was limited to 720p, didn't have as a good picture (I like rich blacks for old movies) or as a good an anti-glare coating (I've been known to watch movies during the day) and didn't do 3D. I don't have much use for 3D now, but if I keep this TV as long as the last one, some future proofing seemed nice. This one also had network features (aka a "smart tv") and the cheaper one didn't. I didn't see a need for the smart features but I suppose they're worth something (and could be upgraded over time). Also I was saving some money on expectations for a receiver so it seemed reasonable to put it in the TV which I'll be looking at. I'm not a hardcore gamer so the one issue of some video lag didn't bother me at all. I expect to keep this TV until it's time to upgrade to 4K video (if that ever happens).

The TV picture is gorgeous. While the screen is 8" bigger, the bezel on this model is smaller than on my old TV. The picture looks both bigger and better and yet fits right in where the old TV was. It's nicer, but not overwhelming. The image is bright and the colors vibrant. I pulled out my old Toy Story DVD because it has a THX Optimizer on it with some image patterns to help you set up the video controls. I even remembered I had ordered the free THX blue glasses and where they were. So I set that up was and was happy. Then a friend mentioned he looked up the settings that some experts post on a forum. I found this for my TV and was surprised to see that there are a set of slides to download to a sd card to run in slide show mode for 100 hours to break in the TV before configuring the video settings. Yeah I'm not doing that. An alternative is to watch regular TV for 250-300 hours. Fine, after Halloween I'll try out these settings, in the mean time I'm pretty happy.

My last receiver was about $1000 so seeing The Wirecutter's pick was $250 surprised me. Shifting to HDMI means many fewer cables and I'm sure simpler insides. It supports 4 HDMI inputs and I had plans for all of those so I thought about future proofing and getting a step up pick with more inputs, but as I researched, it seemed less necessary. At $250, if I need a new receiver in a few years I'll upgrade. I agree with the review that many features on a receiver aren't necessary. I want it to have good sound and switch inputs. Since I've moved all video to HDMI I don't need it to up-convert or anything like that. The one thing I looked out for was that it passed through 3D so that a 3D blu-ray would play on the 3D TV if I ever wanted that.

As for sound, I didn't really use the DSP stuff on the old receiver so this Yamaha had plenty. I'm surprised but I have used a few of the "sound programs" like "Sports" and "The Bottom Line" (a Jazz club effect) and now regularly watch TV with the "Drama" setting. The Wirecutter said that Dynamic Compression was the one useful sound feature and I have used on occasion when watching something late at night. I have surround sound but not a subwoofer (I have neighbors) so 5.1 was just fine. For radio, sure some FM reception is nice, but mostly I want to stream audio from a computer or iOS device (iTunes or Spotify or whatever). The thing it was missing was builtin AirPlay but I have an AirPort Express already and I'm sure I'll eventually get an Apple TV so it didn't need to be builtin. And whatever was builtin would only stream audio and I'd eventually want to stream video too so I'd be looking at an Apple TV anyway.

Since I was going with HD everything it seemed reasonable to get a blu-ray player too and they're just $100. Their pick from Sony seemed fine, particularly on sale at Amazon for $95. It's supports 3D and the Yamaha Receiver will pass it through to the TV, so I'm good to try an Avatar 3D blu-ray or something eventually.

One feature to consider in all of these components is networking. Streaming services for video (Netflix, Amazon) and audio (Pandora, Spotify) are pretty nice. You can get TVs, receivers, blu-ray players, etc that all offer these features but you really don't need them in all your components. This was the one downside I found to The Wirecutter's strategy of picking the best of each device rather than also having a Best System. So my TV and blu-ray player have various streaming options but I'm probably never going to use them since my TiVo has them too. Still I connected them all up with ethernet cables which are more reliable than wifi (and my router was right next to the TV stand) and found they all downloaded and installed software updates when turned on (which was kind of nice). Another network feature is DLNA which lets you stream stuff (video, pictures, audio) from computers. It seems more prevalent for windows but there are some apps for iOS that are supposed to work. The Apple alternative is AirPlay via an AppleTV. Again to use this you only need support for this it in one device, I have it in both the TV and blu-ray and this redundancy makes the choice of skipping networking features in the receiver seem much better.

The last system-wide feature I learned about is called HDMI Control or CEC. With HDMI cables being digital and with devices getting more complicated the industry looked to do more with the digital connections. So if your TV is streaming Netflix for you, you want some way to send the audio back to the receiver to send to the surround speakers. You could use another cable but HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) lets this happen on the same HDMI cable you use to output video from the receiver to the TV. CEC lets the different remotes control the related devices. So turning on the TV will turn on the receiver and the blu-ray player and the volume controls on any of the remotes will affect the receiver. This is another nice benefit of using HDMI cables that I didn't anticipate, but it wasn't easy to get working.

While HDMI CEC is an industry standard, all the venders had to implement it and they have some differences and they all seem to have rebranded it to something else. So Panasonic calls it Viera Link. I do have a universal remote I've used but the remote that came with the new TiVo is quite nice. It's uses radio instead of infra red so it doesn't need to be pointed at the TiVo and it's designed well and has a few unique buttons. One problem is that it's not a learning remote. You can enter codes for different equipment to make TV power and input buttons and volume and mute buttons works with a receiver, but there are no macros and no Receiver power button. HDMI CEC would mean I could the one TV power button to turn on/off my receiver too. My problem was that when I did this, the sound came from the TV and not the receiver. Googling led me to this answer. It seems the Panasonic TV has all the HDMI control options in the setup menu which was easy to find, but there's another option to be found in one the networking apps called VIERA Link and that has one setting for "Speaker Output", change it from TV to Home theater and it all works fine.

So the main device I interact with is the TiVo Roamio. I got the Pro model just to be decadent. I've had it about a month now and am very happy. WIth six tuners I never have a conflict (though I have wanted to record six things at once a couple of times, Sunday has a lot of good TV) and with a 3TB drive I'm not going to run out of room for years, if ever. The picture looks great and I'm having it output everything at 1080p. I got it before the new TV and even hooked up to the old TV using 720p the picture looked much better than my old Series 3. The new HD interface is mostly great and familiar. I like that all movies have their year appended to the title (so you can tell it's a movie) and that almost all TV shows have the season and episode number in their descriptions. Also the guide now shows icons for things that are scheduled to be recorded and new series episodes have a NEW icon. It doesn't manage to show more information on the screen though, the extra real estate is taken up with some ad-like things at the top and a thumbnail picture of what's playing (which I've grown to like over the previous system of overlaying the guide info on top of the full-screen picture).

There are some little things that have annoyed me. Sometimes the clear button will return you to full-screen video, sometimes it won't. It took a while to figure out that the zoom button always works to return to full-screen video. I think I used to be able to use the channel up/down buttons to scroll through a wish list's upcoming show details and now I can't. I also feel like to the rate a show (with thumbs up/down) I have to click more to get to the details description. Right-arrow while watching TV brings up a screen with a few tabs showing info about what's playing, whats being recorded on the other tuners, closed captioning information, and alternate sound tracks. For some reason these tabs are in a different order if you're watching live TV or a recorded show. So that makes a macro to turn on/off closed captions is impossible.

I upgraded from an old TiVo and that process was always start over completely. There was no way to move channel lists, favorite channels, show ratings, season passes, wish lists, or web video subscriptions. Now at least you can transfer season passes via their web site but that wasn't as smooth as it could be. The order of the passes wasn't preserved and auto-record wish lists didn't come over either. Some passes came over but the show is on hiatus and there are no upcoming episodes in the guide; these are displayed as "Corrupt - delete me" which isn't what you want to see. It's also wrong, the correct thing to do is leave them and wait for new episodes to appear in the guide and then they will fix themselves (I've seen this happen in a couple of cases).

There was an issue with certain FiOS cable cards so I was sure to pick up the right model numbers. Cable card install was easy enough, you put it in the TiVo and call an automated FiOS number and read a few codes to active it; but the HBO and Cinemax channels didn't work. FiOS encrypts those and I had problems when they started doing so. I called FiOS, the tech was nice, admitted he hadn't done this before, but got it working within 15 minutes.

The Roamio has a big new feature that it can download and stream video to an iPad or iPad via the TiVo app. I've tried streaming to the iPad once and it was quite nice. It picked up right were I left off, but when I went back to the TV I had to manually advance to the new position. I've just used this on my home network but apparently as of today it will work out of the house too. I can definitely see using this when traveling and it being very useful in a household of several people.

Even though the TV and blu-ray have streaming features, I'm probably going to stick to using the ones in the TiVo. They have good netflix support which is the one service I use now. There's also Amazon Instant but I never understood how that's different from what I get via my Amazon Prime subscription and don't use it much. It is nice that these services are integrated into the search functions of the TiVo. So it will tell you if something is on the device, listed in the upcoming guide or available via Netflix or Amazon.

The only game console I have is a Wii. I used component cables to connect it to the receiver but the Yamaha isn't capable of converting that signal to HDMI so I'd have to run component cables to the TV and switch the TV input to use the Wii. That's not horrible (that's what macros on universal remotes are for) but not ideal. Then I found this device that converts the Wii output to HDMI for just $20 on Amazon. It seems to work perfectly and makes the connections and use a little easier.

I bought five different color High Speed HDMI Cables with Ferrite Cores from Monoprice for about $27 and got a pack of five ethernet cables from Amazon for under $14.

Overall I'm really happy so far.