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When Plug-and-Play A/V Goes Horribly Wrong
http://www.electronichouse.com/article/ … dium=email

My dream A/V setup quickly turned into a nightmare once I realized the gear wasn't going to play nice with one another.

November 10, 2008 | by Richard M. Sherwin

So here I am, mad as hell, happy as a lark and confused all at the same time by some of the finest A/V, video game and computer equipment on the planet. No, I didn’t win the lottery, it’s all on loan for this story, and I couldn’t wait to review it and show my family all this wonderful equipment and see how the other half lives. But before I could do that, I’d have to install it. And therein lies the rub. Because, it looks like, unless you have a custom installer on retainer, you’re going to have problems, even with the very best equipment money can buy.

And right away, at least half of my make-believe, top-of-the-line purchases needed either tech support or their advertised features were a lot of bull…but let’s wait a few paragraphs for that.

The All-Star Lineup
To start this fantasy, I chose what at least a dozen retailers told me was their first choice, top of the line 1080P LCD HDTV, the 42-inch Samsung LN46A850S. The Samsung was also recommended by quite a few industry experts and was one of the few TV sets shown at preview days that looked crisp and clear under not-so-choice settings.

Next I went for the smallest device, the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, an 8 gig MP3 player recorder (with an expansion slot handling 8 GB or more) that can produce enough volume and clarity to be used with my next make believe purchase, the award winning Sonos Multi-room music system.

By the way, I chose the Sansa Fuze over the iPod because of its digital quality and its reputation for handling voice in a much truer fashion than the iPod (it did). I would have tried the new Microsoft Zune, but, alas it wasn’t yet ready from the manufacturer.

I chose the Sonos system for whole house audio sharing because it handles multi-room whole home audio in a more sophisticated fashion and it comes with extra hardware to set up in other rooms.

Because some of the audio-video content was going to come from my own music-video collection, I needed multimedia notebook PCs because both Dell, with its Inspiron line and Toshiba, with its multimedia special edition model, can handle all the content storage, downloading and uploading that anyone could ever use. And in a pinch, if my $10,000 worth of audio-video equipment failed, either of these award winning notebook PCs could do almost any of the play and record functions I was planning. The Dell, in particular, has terrific artwork on the cover of the laptop and its default desktop view shows new artwork as well. I planned to download music, videos and voice from Audible, the wonderful book, magazine and podcast download site using these computers and also using these computers to edit some of the family video…about to be shown for the first time in HD.

According to one of my favorite audiophiles, the best way to enjoy and check out the quality of your receiver and speakers is to listen to voice before music. So the first thing I did was downloaded a few books and podcasts from the Audible site. To round-out my audio-video fantasy I used the new LG Blu-ray player with Netflix and the new Xbox 360 from Microsoft to play my games in HD and the dual tuner TiVo HD to record and playback regular and pay TV.  (There is no better DVR on the market at any price.)

To run the audio I chose Denon’s top-of-the-line home theater in a box, but wound up trading up to the AVR-4308CI because it was simpler and had wireless Internet radio. For speakers I used the Klipsch model XL12, a set of five speakers and sub-woofer which got unanimous 4-star reviews from everyone I asked. Because some of this was going to play in another room, I also borrowed the top of the line surround sound-bar from Polk to try my experiment in a smaller part of the room where there wasn’t space for all the speakers.

Sounds like most any audio-video gamer fan dream team, doesn’t it? Well, guess again. It turns out these fancy-schmancy products, billed as Plug-and-Play turned out to be, for me, Plug-and-Pain.

Trouble Brewing

The Samsung unit declared itself Plug-and-Play ready with an on-screen message. So I started plugging in the Xbox, the TiVo, my HD Cable box from Cablevision, the Internet adapter that the TV comes with and the output from the TV to the Denon receiver.

The first thing I saw on this gorgeous TV - absolutely nothing. My Plug-and-Play didn’t register anything. A quick call to Samsung (they did answer on a weekend) resulted in the tech saying that the superimposed notice on the screen was incorrect. You had to plug each device in separately and, in some cases, turn off the TV and turn it on again in order for the TV to recognize all the inputs.

That wasted 30 minutes.

Then I turned on my Denon receiver to hear Pandora, my favorite Internet radio service. Immediately, the Denon receiver issued a “No Internet connection possible” error message. I called Denon’s tech support only to be disappointed that my $2,500 receiver had no weekend support and the website’s FAQ never addressed this issue. So then I took out my favorite 7.1 channel DVD, put it into the LG Blu-ray player and, voila, I saw the picture on the screen and heard the music blasting. But wait. The picture didn’t fill the gorgeous 1080p screen. Back on the phone again, I called both LG and Samsung in which each company blamed the other for incorrect settings to receive a full-screen DVD picture. 

This was settled by punching some menu buttons which luckily resulted in an amazing full screen picture. But alas, only two of the speakers were blasting away. Where was my 7.1 channel sound? I switched to the Polk Soundbar which did a nice job, but I wanted all of my speakers to work. Once again a battle with tech support ensued until I noticed that there was a tiny button on the Denon that activated 7.1 channel listening.

Plugging in my Xbox brought a major scare. I was captivated by a great car racing game with such vivid detail and clarity until the sound, which minutes before has been like being in the middle of a formula One race, disappeared. Microsoft tech support, which answered right away, said that I had turned the volume up too high. But these speakers and the Denon receiver each had circuit breaking safety technology, so this should not have happened. Polk and Klipsch, who also don’t answer the phone on weekends, obviously couldn’t help. I wound up calling a friend who is a member of the Boston Audio society and was familiar with this issue. She guided me to a reset of the system that restored my audio.

Finally it was time to test the Sonos whole house audio system. I plugged it into the receiver and connected the base unit into its built-in 80211N Wi-Fi adapter. I immediately heard my favorite Internet radio stations and my own collection of digital music from my notebook PCs. I even plugged in my SanDisk Fuze to hear Richard Price’s new best seller from Audible.com.

One final agony though: I never got all the rooms working with my audio content as my Sonos satellite connections never connected…until Monday when their tech support answered some questions.

Ultimately, with all this expensive gear, the only two things that worked from the get-go were computers, which are usually the weakest point in home technology and my Sansa Fuze, the cheapest device in the bunch. When everything was finally up and running, all these products delivered what they promised… great sound, great picture quality, great flexibility, great content. But if you’re spending this kind of money, for this kind of technology, I shouldn’t have had to make one phone call.