Bush Mackel

As I eluded to sometime ago, I’ve upped my home theater game in several different areas. The part that I did something about was my receiver.

I had been rocking the Pioneer VSX-D812-K and while it has been a “loyal friend and true” for quite sometime, not having HDMI inputs or decoding for HD audio was starting to grate on me a bit. Honestly though, I never really made up my mind to change up the receiver but while I was at Worst Buy, I happened upon a receiver that made me cock an eyebrow.

The Pioneer VSX-90TXV
So this receiver was sitting out on a table of “Manager’s Specials” and was listed at $323 I believe. Immediately, the look of it caught my eye as do most of the receivers in the Pioneer Elite lineup. And of course being me the first thing I do is turn it around so I can drool over the connections in the back. Certainly it puts my old receiver to shame but I still had enough restraint to do some research that night at home to check out what it decodes and what it can do. I won’t hit them all up here, but if you’re curious click the link to go to Pioneer’s VSX-90TXV stats.

Fast forward to the next day and I went back to Best Buy and basically fought off another customer to get the receiver. Needless to say, I was grinning from ear to ear thinking I got something that looked really attractive and was indeed really special. That is… UNTIL I hooked my stuff up to it including my 360 and projector… How about - I COULDN’T GET ANY SOUND OUT OF THE RECEIVER. What gives you may ask? Well after many many minutes of research on the big G and forums I found out that if this receiver doesn’t pull audio for HDMI connections, it just passes it through (to say your TV).

I found this out and was just ticked off. What’s the point of having a receiver with HDMI connections if it can’t parse the audio!? The manual says that if you want digital audio, you have to make ANOTHER connection using an optical cord or something… AND SO I needed to find a new receiver.

Enter the Pioneer VSX-1018AH-K!
Over on the AVS Forums, I found out that people who didn’t especially like the 90-TXV went over to the Pioneer VSX-1018AH-K. Sure it doesn’t look AS nice, but the features are really spectacular for its price point. (And I think I managed to snag it at $4-$500 w/ an employee discount). Again, hit the jump to check out all the VSX-1018AH-K specs but some highlights are HD Audio decoding, HDMI connections, and *drumroll* video upconversion!!! That last one is huge because I wasn’t feeling running tons of cables to my projector so being able to put everything through on ONE HDMI cord was pretty choice.

Since hooking things up, I’ve been very happy with the receiver. Things look just great on it and sound even better. Unfortunately, I didn’t take in to account the fact that I live in a townhouse with slotted stairs… Yeah you guessed it, the sound just travels throughout the whole place COMPLETELY unabated. So.. If the wife is sleeping, I can’t crank it too much, but even when it’s on a little it sounds FAB U LOUS.

Not saying that I do it a lot, but when I find myself in a new place the first thing I have to do to feel at home is setup my home theater. So when I bought the new place, first on my list of priorities was to get my home theater stuff up and running!

But then it came to my attention (by way of some friendly wifely reminders) that apparently I was married and had a new kid on the way, so the home theater work became very hurried.

Still, I got SOMETHING done. (#):)

If I Could Start at the Beginning…
I bought my first home theater system from a box for about $300. It was a nice 5.1 system and thankfully the receiver that came with it wasn’t one of those cheap dvd/receiver combos. And over the years as better jobs have afforded me to do so, I’ve updated the system here in there a piece at a time. First it was the receiver that got the upgrade, and then it was the speakers. The last piece that was upgraded was changing my sub from an unpowered to a powered sub.

The Newest Upgrades
Well after moving into the house, I decided to give a big upgrade to two different components of my home theater system, one of which I had never upgraded before. The first one was the receiver. Even though my old one was just fine, it didn’t have HDMI inputs nor did it have support of HD Audio sources. The not having HDMI inputs anywhere has been KILLING me for a LONG long time. The second was, *drumroll* THE DISPLAY! And would you believe it?, I went with a projector! There were a lot of things that went into this decision and rest assured I’ll clue you in on them soon.

The Other Biggie
Not saying that it’s absolutely needed, but one of things that always intrigued me about so called “professional” home theaters was how they often had their audio components in a special place like a closet or something. And so, I went out to build myself my own home theater enclosure! And along the way for this part of the project, I learned a TON that will certainly serve me well in other like minded projects.

Coming Up
I purposefully have not provided much detail about anything here because as I wrote this post, I learned that a single post really couldn’t do any of the above subjects its due justice. So in the next couple of posts I’m hoping to really give some nice detail and pictures about all this stuff. To say it a different way, if you’re a fan of home theater and electronics, some good posts are coming your way! Stay tuned true believers!