The Day The AV Dream Died, Cont.

The GT30 has four HDMI input ports, enough for my HDMI video source needs, which include a TiVo, a HTPC, a Blu-Ray DVD player, and a game console. If you have even more stuff that needs to be connected, get your bipolar brain medicated and stop rampaging about on manic shopping sprees, or get a prescription for an HDMI switcher from your shrink.

All my source gear also has various ways to pump out their respective audio signals via HDMI connections. But my old Sunfire TGIII A/V processor belched up a big acid reflux at the HDMI thought.

The Sunfire geezer sported no HDMI ports and had digital sampling rates that could only shuffle along to 96Khz before flailing around for the portable oxygen. That left using its optical and coax inputs, which are only capable of carrying compressed multichannel Dolby Digital and DTS.

I also have all my music ripped to networked media as WAV files, but when the TGIII was made a LAN party was some kind of misspelled lawn fest. This Old Processor probably should have been bundled off to 3rd world trash pickers.

However, like almost all good AV processors and receivers the Sunfire has a set of (almost) obsolescence-proof 7.1 channel analog inputs. All that was needed was a technically attractive Blu-ray DVD player that could perform high quality digital to analog decoding and squirt the analog results out its fulsome 7.1 rear, then straight into the hopefully willing TGIII.

If you can figure out which one to use, I'm all yours, baby.

But, if I used the TGIII’s straight-shot-to-the amp 7.1 channel analog inputs all the Sunfire's speaker configuration and calibration options, plus bass management would fly out the bypass window. This was of no small concern, as a properly dialed in audio system is key to a great home theater experience.

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