Wall Of Sound

I mentioned earlier that I had acquired a 5.1 surround sound DVD player in trade for some work I did for a friend, so I thought I might talk a bit about that.

A buddy of mine recently upgraded from an older system to a newer, wireless surround sound with Blu-ray DVD system. (OoOoOo... fancy shmancy!)
He had recently gotten it and hooked it up, so his older system was still at the house.

He mentioned offhandedly that he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with the old system.
He didn't want to waste time trying to sell it, since it was older and probably couldn't get much for it, but he also didn't want to throw it away, as it still worked perfectly good.

I said, "Well if you want to get rid of it, I'd take it off your hands if that's okay."
He thought that'd be great, seeing as how I was already doing stuff for him and it would be a good trade.

So I packed it up and brought it home.
Along the way, I also picked up some new speaker wire. (The ones it came with were a bit damaged from his kittens playing with them)

I've never owned or set up a surround sound system before, and since I didn't have the directions that came with them I wanted to devote a whole day to work on getting it together.
My buddy Imperfect found the instruction manual online at the mfg'r's website, so I downloaded it in preparation of setting it up and read through it briefly to familiarize myself with it.

On Wednesday, Hotness worked from home and I had no other plans that day, so I picked that day to get working on taking apart my previous system and getting the new one hooked up.

I'm not going to go into details about the process ('cause it's pretty boring actually).
But I wanted to tell you what I had been using compared to what I have now.

I bought a Panasonic DVD player about 10 years ago. It was my first and only DVD player I purchased (for myself, at least).
I hooked it up to my home stereo and when Hotness and I would watch movies we had the "luxury" of listening to movies play in quadraphonic stereo (two stereo speakers + two TV speakers). This was the height of my sound system and has worked for us all this time.

I'd watched movies at friend's houses with better systems, but was still quite happy with my mediocre system.

I got done fixing the wires on the newer machine and hooked everything up. I turned it on and balanced the speakers.
Then I put in a DVD that I new had a lot of "sounds" so that I could see if I noticed much of a difference.

HOLY COW!!! What a difference indeed!
This new sound system is amazing compared to what we were using before.
There are so many little things we weren't hearing before when we watched movies.
I think we were only getting about 2/3 of the actual soundtrack at any given time.

I'm not an audiophile so I don't go around looking for the latest and greatest to try and get perfection for my ears.
But having used the set-up I had been for the last 10 or so years, I am very excited and happy to have this newer system to use.


In case you're interested, this is what I have now: SONY DAV-C770
It's gotten mediocre reviews, but I can honestly say that I have no complaints about it.
Now I'm going to have to re-watch all my DVDs so I can hear what I'd been missing all this time!