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Last weekend I was sitting here deciding what to buy, not exactly a common thing when you consider I was able to buy just about anything within a particular range. Oh, that’s the beauty of getting paid and feeling financially irresponsible!

I narrowed the selection down to a few things, most of which wouldn’t interest many, regardless they were things I’ve been wanting. As mentioned in an earlier post about the lounge I’d been wanting to upgrade the surround sound system. The amp I had bought (my first), an AIWA 200 (something) is still a great amp, even though it is incredibly old. It has tons of inputs and outputs, including video switching, that was my main selling point… back then I connected a tape deck, cd changer, vcr, computer, the works. It also has 120 wants per channel, pretty sweet, even by today’s standards. The downside was it only did 16 Ohm surrounds. While I could have probably gotten away with using 8 Ohm surround speakers, provided I didn’t turn it up very high (which was easy, damn thing with the Pinnacle speakers was deafening at one quarter volume), thus minimizing the possibility of blowing the amp.

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For those confused… An Ohm is a measure of impedance (resistance, basically how difficult it is for a signal to travel or ‘work’). It’s a little weird, actually, but the higher the Ohm rating of a speaker the crappier it is. It’s more difficult for the signal to actually do something. The weird thing about it though, is that a higher rated speaker is easier to drive with the amp, it draws less power to do its thing (because it’s harder for it to get the power, due to greater resistance). If you’re still with me, which I doubt you are, but whatever… haha. Anyway, if one would connect speakers rated at 8 Ohms to an amp that is setup to provide for speakers rated at 16 Ohms, well, the speakers could (in theory) draw more power than the amp is capable of producing and, well… kaboom! There went the amp… fizzle. The same is true in reverse, you don’t really want to go connecting 8 Ohm speakers to an amp designed for 4 Ohm speakers, as it is possible (in theory) to blow the speaker. This is pretty rare though, and so rare that it really doesn’t need to be worried about…. the primary reason for blown speakers is that of supplying too many ‘watts’ of power to them. Hook up a speaker rated to handle 100 watts at peak (instead of RMS) to an amp that pounds out 200 watts, turn the amp up full blast, and KABOOM! You just blew the cones out of the speaker… d’oh. That actually happened here with a pair of very pricey Pinnacle speakers… idiot brother (or I should say, ignorant at the time) hooked a mega powerful car amp up to said speakers… blew them all to hell and back. I was a hundred shades of pissed off when I discovered that, needless to say.

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Okay, blah blah… I wanted a new surround system, one with surround speakers that would actually be good enough. I priced a system back when I started working on the lounge, I was looking at minimum $700. That was unappealing, I didn’t want to go HTIB, it just didn’t seem right, even though they’re much less expensive… problem is the speakers usually sound like tin cans too. I had bought an RCA (ugh) HTIB many years ago just to get the 16 Ohm surrounds to hook into my AIWA, awful doesn’t begin to describe them.

The AWIA, as I said, is a great amp, even to this day… it’s just lacking in the critical surround sound department. Granted at the time surround systems were not very common things, so it was more of an added, yet half-assed feature. It doesn’t have any digital inputs, which at the time didn’t exist, thus it can’t support Dolby Digital or DTS. You need digital to get ‘true’ surround sound, period. Dolby ProLogic just doesn’t cut it.

Since this is something I’d been wanting for a while I’m always keeping my eyes open for it. I saw this really neat looking HTIB by Panasonic a few weeks ago at Target…. It was integrated though, meaning it had a DVD player built in… They figure that if you have a DVD player built in you don’t need digital inputs for some reason… makes some sense, since that is primary what they’re used for, but regardless that caused it to be struck from the list. What if I wanted to hook up a Tivo, or digital cable/sat boxes, or even a swank Apple Airport Express? I’d be SOL. Prior to that dreaded discovery I did check out reviews for it and in general people really liked it, said it sounds great, etc… I just don’t know what they really mean by that, since great to one person can be shit to another.

I discovered that Panasonic made a few other systems, including those without DVD players built into them. The lack of a DVD player, in my opinion, is a bonus… I have a very good Philips DVD player already, I paid $150 for it… it has BOTH coaxial and optical (toslink) digital out, something getting to be unheard of, there’s either one or the other usually these days.

Price, always important, even to someone like me who tends to spend money as if it is water (even though I REALLY should not!). It’s difficult for me to keep together enough money to buy a super duper system like I wanted, simply because I always find something to spend it on. It doesn’t help that I have about ten pages in a notebook devoted to things I want to buy…eventually. They range from simple things like napkins and glass cleaner to seriously expensive things like that Francis Francis espresso machine I lust unendingly for.

Related to price, just how good is good enough for me? Do I need to buy “the best” or will something more low-end work perfectly for me? A perfect example is the process of choosing which laptop, I lusted for a Powerbook, I could have bought it too… but in the end I chose the iBook, it was perfect for me and allowed me to also buy a digital camera and wireless access point with enough cash left over for, well… whatever. I still love the iBook years later and to my amusement Matthew said in amazement “wow, that’s fast!” when using it a couple of weeks ago. Fast? HA… it’s only a 600MHz G3! Oddly enough, it keeps up in Photoshop just as well as the 2.53GHz P4 I’m writing this on, lol.

With the volume at one quarter (maximum), as mentioned before, the 120 watts per channel AIWA was essentially major overkill in the power department. I had to be careful to ‘keep it down’ or risk waking the family anytime I had someone over for drinks or whatnot. This check with reality was what I needed. I could truly get away with running speakers that handle 50ish watts and still have it at half volume. Bigger is not always better when dealing with real situations.

To get to the point, finally, I bought a Panasonic HT-05 system. It has a peak of 600 watts total, and that includes the subwoofer. It’s RMS rating is somewhere in the 370 watts range, providing on RMS 30 watts to most channels, not counting the subwoofer. The speakers have a max rating of around 55 watts. This meant I could listen to it fairly loud, just increasing the risk and possibility of causing the speakers to go into clipping (audio distortion caused be overpower situations).

It does NOT have a DVD player built in, it has two optical digital connections and one coax digital connection. Coax is important because for one it is a hell of a lot cheaper than fiber optic cable and as mentioned before my DVD player will do either. Something amazing is that the ‘universal’ remote control actually controls EVERYTHING. I had hoped it would control the Panasonic TV, but you never really know, lol. The Panasonic TV’s remote wouldn’t work with anything other than the TV, making its ‘universal’ nature a total joke.

I do have a couple of gripes though. While in general I like the remote’s layout, shape, etc… there is a button labeled something like “A/V System ON” which one would think meant by pressing it everything would power on, say… you hit that button and it turns on the DVD, TV, and Amp. Nope, it doesn’t function as an “all on” button. You have to press “TV” and then the “AV On” button and then the “Receiver On” button. Repeat the first process to also turn on the DVD. That’s ever so slightly annoying, but realistically that’s what I had to do with my other universal remote too. Easily dealt with by leaving the Amp & DVD player on 24/7, heh… Hell, my TV is on nearly that much, just because I forget to turn it off… bad Indi!

The other gripe is about the speakers, something mostly unimportant and I knew it going into it, but they have bases, which is nice, but they don’t come off! The nice part is that they have little rubber feet to isolate vibration and thus not turn whatever they’re sitting on into part of the speaker box, that is definitely good. When they’re hanging on the wall they look a tiny bit, well… stupid. Most probably wouldn’t even notice it though, only minor points taken away.

Actually, I have three gripes. The receiver won’t allow for ‘programming’ the Game/Aux option to use any of the digital inputs. I connect my iPod to the Game/Aux ‘choice’ through RCA audio cables at the moment so that isn’t much of an issue, but when adding the Airport Express it would be nice to not have to choose “DVR” to listen to it. Again, just a minor grip, it could not possibly be difficult for them to have added that in, right? The iPod on its own doesn’t have digital out anyway, and I suppose the dock doesn’t either, though I wish it did; the Airport Express does have ‘mini-optical’ out though, lol. Tangents, oh how I love thee! There is no way I’m aware of to get a digital audio signal out of the iPod (argh!), connecting it via USB to the Airport Express doesn’t seem feasible because one would still need a computer to pipe it to the mini-optical out on it through Airtunes. With the iBook and the Airport Express I’d kind of eliminate the need for the iPod being hooked into the sound system… it’s a tradeoff though, because then I’d need the iBook on and running. I think I prefer the current setup even if it is *gasp* analog.

I love the new system though, gripes aside and they are minor. I’ve not yet ‘cranked it’ because I’ve not needed to. Oh, one more gripe is how the volume level works, it’s done in decibels FROM maximum. This means that at a setting of “30″ you have 29 more ’steps’ before you hit max, so when turning the volume higher the number actually gets smaller. To me this is completely counter-intuitive! At least it lets you know how much louder you can make it before it maxes out. I think it goes down to -90 or something, but that’s insane because I can’t hear anything below 50 or so. With digital signals it doesn’t need to be as loud anyway because the signal is much, much stronger. Listening to a DVD I have it set at 30 and it’s pretty fucking loud… Normal TV watching from the couch it hovers around 40, needing to bump it up a bit if on the bed some 20 feet from the center channel.

Dolby Prologic does a good job of separating stereo into surround for most TV programs, Dolby Digital sounds sublime… and once I figured out DTS, well… blow my socks off yummy sound.

The DTS saga was the epitomy of me being stupid, actually no… not being able to get any digital sound was the epitomy. I bought my fancy coax cable, knowing that I could use a regular RCA style cable, it’s just the whole impedance thing… they’re the same physically in terms of appearance, but impedance is different when dealing with a regular ‘audio’ RCA cable and a ‘digital’ coax cable with RCA ends. I hooked the fancy cable into the wrong plug! It made sense to me, without being able to see the label, that the coax audio would be next to the digital audio connector… oh, and it is, but on the other side of it, lol. I plugged the audio cable into the composite video out… no sound, no matter what I tried, lol. I felt seriously stupid once I figured out why I had no sound.

DTS, well, that’s pretty similar in the realm of stupidity. I have only one DTS (Digital Theater Systems - a competitor to Dolby Digital) DVD, it’s The Fast & The Furious, such a stupid movie, but we have it for some reason. I assumed, because I know that DTS is better than Dolby Digital (subjective, not objective), that if DTS were available on a DVD it would automatically use that of course. Since it didn’t go into DTS I worried that my super fancy DVD player couldn’t do it, it was too old or something. Leave it to me to drive thirty minutes to Hagerstown to buy a new DVD player at 2AM. I bought a fairly nice one that claimed DTS ability. Granted, I was a little confused… I didn’t know if the DVD player and the receiver had to be able to use it, or if just one or the other, etc. I should have thought about it a little better, because if a DVD is sending ‘raw’ instead of processed ‘pcm’ data through the digital line that the DVD player’s processing ability was totally unimportant provided the receiver could figure it out. To be clear, as long as your surround receiver can process DTS and your DVD player can output RAW sound data, you’ll be able to use DTS, you do not need a DVD player with a decoder!

I didn’t figure all that out until I STILL couldn’t listen to the DTS audio on that stupid DVD. I kept hitting the nifty ‘audio’ button where one should be able to switch tracks to find the stupid little stopsign/hand icon being displayed — the DVD wouldn’t let me change it. After researching the DVD I found out this was a gripe others had with that particular DVD, you need to choose between which English languge track (DD5.1 or DTS) under the “Languages” option of the main menu. It never occured to me to check that menu for DTS, changing the type of digital audio is NOT changing the language… pay attention DVD authorists! If you have audio options put them in a menu called “Audio” or “Setup”… “Audio” as the menu title works perfectly fine in the semantic sense even if you include different language options, having audio setup options under “Language” DOES NOT.

Once I found that option the DVD warned me about only using DTS if my equipment supported it and thus had to ‘agree’ to allow it use the DTS encoded audio. Somehow this brought about the lightbulb of realization for me, I quickly unhooked the new DVD player, set the old one back up, and bingo… I had DTS audio coming from my supposedly non-DTS supporting DVD player. Needless to say, even though that Panasonic DVD player (the S27… the lowest end, since Walmart doesn’t sell the one I would have rather bought, but they do have a lovely EASY return process, mwahaha) worked fine, and btw, even though Panasonic doesn’t claim support for DVD+R discs, which would have been a major flaw considering I burn DVD+R (it is better, objectively, not subjectively, compared to DVD-R) the Panasonic DVD player reads DVD+R discs without issue, score for that. I guess the specifications/features indicate DVD-R because their recorders use it… it’d be assinine to do only one or the other, either way.

So, yes, needless to say I took that new DVD player back, no point in buying a new one if the one I had did everything I wanted it to do. Yes, it would be nice to have a DVD player here in the office, but I’d probably buy some PoS $30ish dollar player for up here, especially considering my computer can play DVDs, ya know?

Another weird thing, to which my brother Matt says is becoming more common, the speakers connect into the subwoofer, as the subwoofer contains the actual amp. This prevents one from ever upgrading the subwoofer, and could pose a placement problem because of the six foot ‘control cable’ required between the receiver and the sub, but for me it’s a non-issue. The subwoofer sounds good though, it fills out the sound without being overly thumpy… but of course with electronica there is enough of a nice thump happening to not complain about the lack thereof too.

Conclusion, choice well made, the Panasonic HT-05 is a great receiver and speaker set, plus it sounds amazing in my roughly 12×25′ lounge. Want to know what I paid for it? You’ll gasp… $200! It lists for $300, (I think), Circuit City and various other places had it for $250, Bestbuy (which meant a trip to Frederick — an hour each way roughly) had it for $200! Yes, folks, we call that a steal. Add in $16 more for ‘cheap’ wall mounts from Walmart, and even though they come to roughly $4 each and are made of plastic, they seem to work just fine… especially compared to $25 each at the CC or BB, lol. Also add $10 for better speaker wire… the shit that comes with the system is, I’m guessing, 20 gauge, which is just too thin. I thought I had 16 gauge wire, but upon restripping to hook it up I determined it to be 18… pretty good, but, no… 16 is considered much better still. I didn’t opt for 14 gauge, I think it’s overkill and, really, I don’t think it’d fit into the little clips anyway.

I deviated from the point of this post so badly that I don’t even want to try and bring it back to where it should be, lol. I gave it away as to what I bought, but didn’t go into what I could have bought instead, but I will… just wait. ;)