2. home-theater
  3. 984298406

Anybody else wanna pull their hair out ?

I just got done trying to "re-plumb" my HT system. How i pity professional installers of this stuff. It is PATHETIC what one has to do to get all of this stuff hooked up "right". I am an electronics tech by trade and even i get confused as to what goes where !!! The two worst things that i realized is that there is really no standardization of jacks ( audio RCA's, Balanced, S-Video, Component Level video, Composite Video, 75 ohm digital, toslink, spades, banana's, etc....). Between the 3 trillion different types of connectors, you also have to worry about what length of each type of cable you need where.... It's enough to drive you crazy. On top of that, you should pray to God that you never loose power once you get all of that crap programmed !!! Some of this stuff will "reset" at the drop of a hat. Take my advice people. Keep your HT system as simple as possible !!! You'll enjoy it more when you watch a good movie rather than remembering all of the hassle that you had to go through just to get the damn thing to work. I would do things VERY differently if i knew then what i know now. Sean
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sean
puddles
44 posts
 
I'm not into HT (and I too have little hair left to pull out), but there is a big help re:wall warts. There is a product called Dr. Ferd's Wart Remover. You plug the wallwart into this, and there is a short AC cord/plug which inserts into your power strip/source. I got mine a Musician's friend, and I now have enough spcae in my power strips. FYI
3728slingshot
102 posts
 
I also just re plumbed ... I had to draw out diagrams and it still isn't right (I think). My beef is that you need to keep all of the equipment is a fairly local setup to avoid the cost of cables running over the cost of a pair of speakers. Even a modest set of cables for my rig in a compact arangement is over a thousand dollars!!!! After this I am seriously thinking that a receiver may be the answer for HT after all. No wonder Bose sells so much crappy sounding stuff ... the good stuff is too hard to wire!
slartibartfast
100 posts
 
Well, you should try and "plumb" 25 different components (not including the speakers) in the same system... and then try throwing balanced professional gear in the mix too... as well as seperate AC circuits for Analog, Digital, and Video. This installation could never have been done without lots of advanced planning and every time we change a piece of gear, you usually just can't throw it in the loop. The only real pain was that not all of the older professional gear was pinned the same way and had to go in to the cables with a soldering iron to fix the problems. Not for the faint of heart... dealers are even scared of the installation and rightfully so.
pcc
150 posts
 
I too had to re plumb not long ago. I have a HT system and was adding 2channel to it. Well when I started to audition some new pre amps for the 2ch I realized I had removed a couple of cables.. oops Well one of my friends who is into electronics had these sticky numbers 0-9/letters A-Z.. I remembered this and when I figured I would be doing this all over again I went to radio shack and picked up 2 packs of labels for electronics. The labels had long and thin for around cable and small square label for tight area. For instance the #1 would go on both ends of the cable and the square #1 would go on the "out" of one component to the "in" of the other component. Now its easy when I audition new cables or components. Just look at the # or the letter.. Good luck Cost $2.00 radio shack
swampwalker's avatar
swampwalker
5,138 posts
 
Or you could do like me and have a different brand of IC for each component. LOL. Actually true however, unfortunately. Side effect of buying used on web. So far I've been too cheap to buy new (except for T-14 speaker cable. Now I think I'm going to change my whole 2 ch over to Homegrown, at least for ICs (but that shifts the MIT, Straightwire, etc over to the HT, which still allows me to differentiate ICs based on wire type. However, my HT speaker set up consists of NHT superzeros with sub for LCR and a separate sub for LFE (all with same speaker wire) so that's enough of a nightmare. Pcc great idea for the labels.
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