Overdue A/V Upgrade

March was a good month, business-wise, and so I’m splurging on a new A/V receiver. This definitely falls into the category of “luxury” but it will fill several “needs”:

1. When we built this house two years ago I wired it for 7.1 surround sound. We had the four rear speakers installed in the ceiling at the time so they could be painted to match, but two of them have never been connected because our current receiver is an old-and-busted 5.1 model. The new receiver will enhance our listening pleasure by approximately…let’s see, carry the one…20%. (The new box is actually a 7.2 receiver; I guess the .2 means that we could run two sub-woofers, but I have no idea why I’d want to do that. I value our drywall too much.)
2. Our current receiver also does not have an HDMI connector, meaning that the digital HD cable signal is bypassing the receiver completely, going from the cable box directly to the display. So the picture is great, but the audio – well, not so much. Plus, whenever we want to watch a DVD, I have to plug a separate S-Video cable into the side of the TV, which looks ugly in addition to being less than optimal for picture quality. (I knew that eventually I’d have HDMI capabilities, so I didn’t go to the trouble to run an S-Video cable through the wall to the TV…in case you’re wondering.) The new receiver has six HDMI ports, which should pretty much satisfy our hi-def connection needs for, say, the next two decades, or until something better comes out next month.
3. This means that we can upgrade to a Blu-Ray player if we so desire. Perhaps April will be a good month, too, although Blu-Ray machines are becoming almost ridiculously inexpensive, at least compared to where they started.
4. And, finally, because the new receiver supports music streaming by Ethernet, I can finally see if the CAT-5 cable I had run from my office over to the A/V bookshelf actually works. Or, to be more precise, I can finally see if I know how to hook things up so that my computer will talk to the receiver and make sweet music together.

The biggest compromise I made with this selection is that Onkyo’s receivers are “Sirius-ready” but not “XM-ready.” But I don’t have my XM base station connected in the house anyway, so I’m not anticipating that to be a great loss.

What I am simultaneously dreading/looking forward to is disconnecting everything from the old receiver and trying to get it all plugged into the right places on the new one. And, because of the “cascading upgrade” effect, I’ll have to do this multiple times, as I move the old receiver into another room to replace and even older one, and move that even older one into a room without one at all.