The transforming digital living room

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Michael Rogers

Columnist

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Audio is the other big change in the living room environment. Suddenly you’re being offered systems that provide surround sound with 5.1, 6.1, even 7.1 speakers. (The decimal doesn’t mean you get 1/10 of a speaker -- it indicates that one of the speakers is a subwoofer for deep bass notes.) For now you’re probably well-served with a 5.1 speaker system, but there’s no harm in buying a receiver that will support a few additional speakers down the line. With that many speakers, it’s crucial that they are properly balanced, and sophisticated receivers like the Yamaha RXV657 now have the ability to “listen” to themselves and adjust for appropriate surround balance.

Setting up a home theater system can be a remarkably confusing sea of cables and connectors -- hence the recent popularity of “home theater in a box” (HTIB) which gives you all the components you need plus easy connection directions. Even so, when you’re talking about five or six speakers, you’re looking at a lot of wires running through your living room. Thus soon we’ll see a number of home theater systems with wireless speakers; Sony’s DAV-FR10W is an early example. (Wireless is also going to be very important for distributing audio and video from your living room to other rooms in the house; more on that in a later installment.)

Bring on the 'media server'
The newest component to enter the living room is the so-called “media server” -- basically a giant hard drive on which you can store both video and audio files. At the moment media servers are still evolving out of the personal computer world, as with Hewlett Packard’s top-of-the-line z557 Digital Entertainment Center. Media servers can offer a multitude of functions, ranging from an HD television tuner and DVR functionality to DVD recording and playback. One caveat, however: when users begin to play their MP3 files through the living room’s high quality surround sound systems, the results may prove distinctly disappointing. As media servers catch on, expect a big market for upgraded audio files in the years ahead.

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One final question: how are you going to control all these boxes? The answer, of course, is via remote control, but that’s where it can get complicated. If you purchase a home theater in a box and add other components that are all from the same manufacturer, you may be able to get along with the remote control that’s originally provided. But if your audio-video empire gets at all complex, you may want to look at a more sophisticated remote control with “macro” abilities, so that a single button push adjusts a number of components simultaneously. Folks with plenty of programming patience swear by the Philips Pronto series, such as the TSU3000; the Harmony line, a relative new-comer, uses a simple Web-based wizard to program the unit.

The remainder of this decade will see an unprecedented makeover of living room entertainment -- an even bigger shift than the introduction of audio CDs produced back in the Eighties. The key concept to keep in mind is that everything will be connected. In the living room of the future, each component needs to play well -- and also to play well with others.

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