Sunday, October 31, 2010

Has new toys ...

Before launching into the main post, a few words for an Auntie who passed away this weekend. We always got a very warm welcome when visiting the Northern branch of the family and a lot of that was due to this lovely lady who I had the great privilege to have as an aunt. Very sad to hear that she's gone, thoughts go out to the Rotherham people.

Cunning plan : head over to get new eleccy bits on a Sunday when, theoretically, traffic will be quiet.

Doh ! So much for the cunning plan, I ended up having my arms almost coming off carrying half of the new toys the couple of hundred yards to the car park. (I decided to take the Richer Sounds people's advice on the other half and parked outside the store)

So - what have I got ?

I got bored of waiting for the Denon kit, plus I was reading reviews that said that their budget AV kit was a bit lacking compared to the competition. So I went for an Onkyo TX-SR508 and a set of Tannoy SFX5.1 speakers. This afternoon was spent setting it all up after this morning had me dismantling the old gear and moving things around a little. (there's still a bit to do there)

<> Quick addon - the Onkyo is now On Probation. I'm getting regular sound cut outs of about 0.5 secs each time. Suspect that it's a heat related that the amp has no business having because it's in open space.

The Onkyo receiver is simple enough, you put the multitude of wires in and turn it on. I'm impressed with how seamlessly it has snuck in between my various bits and pieces. Cable box goes to telly as before, telly sends audio to receiver. Blu-ray goes through receiver to telly. Itunes will go in the front for now, until I get me another lead. Xbox will go in there too but is another that needs a lead because I got to scavenging. It has menus that can overlay on to the telly screen.

Let it do its automatic setup and it's all sorted.

The speakers are a similar story, although I wasn't really expecting having to cut the leads down to size myself. There's a decent amount of cable included (looks like 42 strand thickness) and it cut down easily with normal wirecutters. Glad I found some of those, perhaps a scary sign of my maturity (maturity = scary bit) is that I wasn't looking forward to going Old Skool (teeth) to strip the wires.

How's it sound ? Telly sounded great, including not having the grating sound that's marred the telly speakers since I cleaned the dust off.

There's a lesson : Dust keeps vibration away

I'm now watching Star Wars Episode 1, which (with a little tweak to boost the centre speaker slightly) is sounding quite impressive. It'll sound better when I have the room arranged to satisfaction as clutter tends to deaden sound. Getting good bass thrum from the loud stuff and it's picking out the huge selection of noise sources (people in crowd, music from action, things like that) pretty well.

Music testing (extensive) will come later. For now though, I have to draw this post to a close cos the popcorn is getting cold. And the Boonta Eve Classic just started.

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