A few months ago I posted this thread, in which I asked about advice in setting up a small home theater system. The responses convinced me to buy an AVR (specifically an AVR-1913 from Denon). I bought a refurbished model because otherwise it would have been too expensive, and my experience with refurbished electronics has generally been good. Using this device you plug all your devices into the receiver (using hdmi) and there was a single hdmi cable from the receiver to the tv. When I first unboxed it and hooked it up, it worked great. Then I turned it off and when I turned it back on, it would not work unless I performed a full “reset” (basically unplugging all cables and all power for 30 minutes). I spent a great deal of time at avsforum trying to resolve this problem without success. I eventually dropped it off at a Denon repair facility. They looked at it and told me they could find nothing wrong. Something was amiss with my tv set (a sony kdl46v5100). I read a bit about my tv and discovered there was a firmware update available. I updated the firmware without incident only to find that now the receiver does not work at all, reset or no.
I am not asking for advice on this particular problem. I am returning it because the 30 day window is closing. On the avs forum I basically got two responses;
[ol]
[li]Bypass the hdmi (connect your devices directly to the tv and connect your devices to the receiver via optical audio).[/li][li]Return it.[/li][/ol]
I suspect the first solution would have worked, but I would have lost a lot of features and any integration in the system would have been lost. So I am taking the second option. Has anybody else out there had a negative experience with these devices? Is there any point in my buying another unit (perhaps a Sony), or are these devices just not ready for prime time?
I’ve had problems between a normal cable box / DVR and an HDMI TV. Cable guy said it was the TV, but it worked right for months, then failed for months, and worked right again later (after moving, but using same cable boxes). So I blame the cable box software: every time it gets updated, they’ve improved one thing but impaired two, or vice versa. Sigh.
In general, I prefer component video to HDMI, which is a shame. But HDMI just seems to cause problems (most notably, blackouts when commercials switch to lower video formats while fast-forwarding, etc.) It’s not the cable, it’s the protocol and how that protocol is (mis)implemented in various devices. No doubt it’ll all work fine within 5 or 10 years, at which time they’ll have something newer/better/buggier.
Gotta keep those armies of software engineers employed somehow, I guess. Being a software engineer, I guess I’ll live with it.
I got the Denon AVR-1613, and I haven’t had any problems. I have the cable box, DVD, and FM radio hooked into it, with the output to the TV. I have three front speakers for sound. No subwoofer, as I am on the second floor of an apartment building. Works good, except that the IPod that I have is too old to be supported by the IPod input connection. Bastards.
My impression of your solution #1 (bypass AVR) would be that the audio would not sync with the video, but I could be wrong. I’m curious if anyone could tell me that I am wrong or right.
Depends on the input delays and TV involved whether audio would sync or not. It should be fairly close unless you intentionally delay the audio in the receiver too much for some reason , but you won’t get that perfect sync that you get by default by pushing everything through HDMI unless the TV is slower than the receiver (often true), and you manually set the right audio delay on the receiver.
HDMI is a pain. I’ve got an Onkyo reciever with 7 inputs and 2 outputs. I still haven’t figured out how that matrix works. Rather than using both HDMI out, I just ran component straight from the DirecTV box to the TV. Everything on the projector is HDMI. I removed a lot of cables by changing over, but I’m not sure it’s worth it yet. You can’t quickly change channels anymore, since it switches between the different formats each time you change channels.
I’ve got a Sony BDV-E370 BD/DVD player home theatre unit. It does integrate with our Sony TV (KDL32EX400), but it doesn’t have any HDMI inputs. The HDMI from this player and the Satellite decoder goes to the TV and there is an ARC to feed the audio back through the HT. Maybe Sony did it like this because it still doesn’t work the best using the receiver/HT as a high definition video matrix.
It has never locked up and if you switch from the player as the source to the sat decoder, the audio feed input switches to match the video input. That means that it is using the ARC (Audio Return Channel) to get the audio from the sat decoder through the TV to the player. I see that the model TV you have doesn’t appear to have the ARC, so this may not be a solution for you. In fact the review I read of the KDLxxV5100 didn’t have anything to say about the audio. Not promising to start with.
Let me guess, a Comcast/Cisco cable box and a Vizio TV. That’s a notorious issue. And the designers of HDMI were either extremely incompetant or smoking crack. There were well established serial digital protocals they could have built on instead of one designed for driving a computer monitor a couple of feet away from the computer.
