Spent the better part of the last 2 days finally unpacking and installing my sound system. Good lord this stuff is a pain in the ass. And this is with the hard part already done for me. The previous owner had wall-mounted his speakers so he already had speaker wire running through the walls and ceiling for a Dolby 5.1 system. Unfortunately, the parts of the wire that was available at each speaker location was just a smidgen too short to reach my satellite speaker connectors. On two of them I was able to yank out enough wire to make them reach but the other two wouldn't budge so I had to make a trip out to Home Depot to grab some lengths of wire, electrical tape and wire connectors. Actually I wound up making three trips to Home Depot cause I got the wire size wrong the first time (good thing I only bought 5 feet then) and I had to make the third trip to buy some dry wall screws cause I forgot to buy a speaker mount for the center speaker.
Mounting the satellites onto the wall wasn't particularly hard but I always feel nervous when drilling holes into dry wall cause I hate having to patch up the holes if I mess up. The stud finder worked pretty well and out of 10 screws I had to use, only 2 needed support cause there was no stud where it was needed.
Connecting the speaker wires to the receiver sapped more funds as I decided to go with banana connectors so that it'd be easier to plug and unplug the wires. Normally you can insert the bare wires into the connectors on the receiver and then screw them down but it takes some time and is a pain in the ass since the connectors are so close together so using banana plugs makes things so much easier. But to have to pay $20 per set of 4 is practically highway robbery. I swear the companies that make cables and accessories for computers and A/V equipment have got to be making money hand over fist by screwing the hell out of the consumer. It's gotta be one of the biggest scams ever.
Anyway, after setting the speakers up, I also had to start routing all my components (DVD player, SVHS deck, XBox 360, digital cable box) to the receiver. Unfortunately, Comcast's cable box doesn't support HDMI repeating so connecting the box to the receiver via the DVI to HDMI cable and then having the signal go from the receiver to the TV via HDMI doesn't freakin' work! So I have to connect the digital cable box directly to the tv. Although I'm connecting audio from the box to the receiver via fiberoptic cable. If Comcast doesn't fix this I may need to buy a longer DVI-HDMI cable and run it into the wall so that when I do get around to wall-mounting the TV we don't get one visible black cable snaking up the wall.
Routing everything through the receiver raises another issue where things just get really complicated really quick. I actually had to write down to which inputs everything was connected to. And the more components you have, the more remotes you have to deal with. Right now I have to juggle 3 remotes just to watch cable. =p
Anyhoo, I gotta also find time to organize the huge mass of wires and cables that this setup generated. Pretty nuts. I also probably need to buy a new cheapo receiver to use with the ceiling mounted speakers that exist in the bedrooms and kitchen. Ugh. But at least the majority of it is done.
