Thinking of a major upgrade for our TV lounge. Have shopped around and found an Independent specialise / family business who said:

Buy plasma not LCD
Buy Pioneer (for TV) - everything else is a compromise
Buy HD DVD (not Blu ray) - too expensive
Buy good, not great amp
Buy great speakers - suggested - B&W

Quoted TV (42") plus HD DVD plus amp plus the B&W speakers (3 front, 2 rear and one subwoofer), plus HD satellite upgrade, with full install ie TV on wall no wires anywhere etc for UK£ 3000 - 3500.

Sure many of you have been through this - any advice??

Thanks,

Darren.

The one recommendation I would make is to actually view and listen to the components that will go into your system before you buy. The size of the system [screen, A-V amp and speakers] needs to take into account the size, shape and textures of the room this system will be going in to. One of the most useful features of my home entertainment system is the Sennheiser wireless headphone system.

If you can visit a store where you can see all sizes of plasma and LCD screens you can decide for yourself which screen suits your needs.

Take the time to understand your decisions and enjoy the results.

I have done a ton of research on this topic and just recently bought two 50" TV's.

I think you got some bad advice... maybe not bad advice but over simplified.

Pioneer does make maybe the best Plasma TV's right now. However, you pay a huge price premium on many TV's. IE 50% more money for 10% better picture.

LCD pictures are in many ways superior on the latest generation TV's. Generally smaller LCD TV's are superior, so if you are buying a 46" or smaller TV, I would have to say you can find a better LCD than Plasma. If you want 50" or bigger, you will most likely prefer the plasma pictures. However, there are some really big really expensive new large LCD's that kick *** too - exceptions to every rule.

HD DVD does seem to be the way to go right now. Personally I think that prices on players will drop 50% before the fall.

I own a pair of B&W speakers so obviously I am a fan. I agree that you can get 95% out of good speakers with a cheaper amp (I have a pretty cheap amp). That being said, if I could buy my speakers again, I would have probably spent less money. Good sound has more to do with setting up the room properly than with the speakers themselves. I have heard speakers that cost half as much as mine sound twice as good.

If you are buying a 42" TV, as you said, you should buy a 1080p LCD in my opinion. The picture will look clearer and more detailed.

B&W doesn't make very outstanding subwoofers IMO.

Also, I think that the lower end B&W speakers aren't so hot. Which speakers are you getting? I would say the entry point to B&W speakers that really shine are the CM1 bookshelves and CM7 floor standers. The 600 series is not very good for the money, there are plenty of better speakers. I've never demoed the 700 series but the 800 series sound amazing (obviously).

Thanks for the quick advise guys:

mpollard; the process from here is that the sales guy comes to our house and surveys the room, he makes his exact reccommendations then goes back to the shop to set that up in their dummy room (which I suspect with have superb dynamics!!) - we then call in a few hours later to experience it so hopefully this will cover a demo - thanks for the headphone advise.

Kor, again thanks for the points I will ask the questions related to the points you make. The speakers are part of B&W's MT home cinema range - MT10, 20 and 30 I believe incorporating the M1 speaker. Appreciate your views???

mpollard and Kor both give good advice. I'll add:

For displays, the four main things to pay exacting attention to are:

(1) native resolution - you want native 1920x1080
(2) scan rate - you want 60fps or higher. If 120fps is on the market yet it is the total win, because it can do both TV and film frame rates natively.
(3) contrast ratio - you want 800:1 or better. otherwise black looks dark grey and colors are less vivid.
(4) the dark horse - backlight/phosphor quality. There are some fancier LCDs with higher quality light sources now, that enable more natural, realistic, vivid color rendition. This is a subtle but important look-and-feel issue. Last I checked, the phosphors used in plasma displays could not match the color accuracy/range of either high end CRTs (now only sold for broadcast engineering) or top end LCDs.


You should make sure the display has at least one HDMI 1.3 (or newer) input to assure a degree of future-proofing.

It will be much cheaper to attain native 1920x1080 with LCD than with plasma, and the LCDs are essentially immune to burn in, whereas plasma still has some vulnerability.

As for HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray: relative to resolution, HD-DVD's bit rate and codec efficiency make it roughly comparable with good ol' DVD, whereas Blu Ray is a step up in quality, but Blu Ray has region coding **** and is more expensive and so far less accepted by the market. Neither one is the bee's knees but I'd go with HD-DVD if I were buying today. Check out the Wikipedia entry on Blu Ray for a detailed comparison.

B&W has a tremendous breadth of product. I own a pair of the current 804S' for listening to music along with an ASW675 sub. But, when I needed to put a satellite system together for my home theater set-up I went with Monitor Audio based on looks & sound. I've owned various pieces of B&W equipment over the years. I like their sound in general for jazz & classical music. But, the TV & loudspeakers are the most subjective parts of the system IMO. I would listen to several speakers in your price range to make sure that you end up with something that is pleasing to you. And of course, don't forget about the run-in period with whatever speakers you do select. They may sound more forward and not as warm as they did in the shop when you first hook them up. That's nothing to panic over. They just need to be run-in.

Best of luck - what fun you are going to have!

__________________
'07 CS Speed Yellow

Mex,

Good luck with your purchase. I used to spend a lot of money on stereo equipment. One day I was at a friends house listening to his JBL/Onkyo system that he purchased at Circuit City. It sounded great. In a store next to a system costing 10x as much it may seem lacking, but by and large, standing alone, the "lesser" manufacturers are producing pleasing products. I used to have Adcom mono amps and Vanderstein speakers with a Yamaha DSP and little B&W surrounds. All that sh*! got eBay'd and I now have a do it all Yamaha unit(probably over spent on it) driving a 6-set of Phase Linear's mounted on the wall and a Velodyne sub. The whole shooting match cost me $2,100 USD. That was 4 years ago, now there is HD/Blue Ray and soon to be something a step up from DTS 6.1. The point is, I got a better system for about 1/4 of the money, and, while I'm happy with it, it could probably be blown away by an even cheaper system now. Expensive stereos depreciate worse than sports cars, so unless you have a very critical ear to please, you may be suprised at what will work for you from a store that is not quite as high-end. Whatever you do, don't spend $500 on a speaker cable. You have no idea how bad those starving kid commercials make you feel when your watching them on you system with the 4 guage speaker wire.

Dave

PS we just put a Sony Bravia LCD TV in the kitchen and it has a great picture. Now we hardly ever go to the home "theater" to fire up the projector. The whole system now gets used on an infrequent movie night.....

I've never demoed the MT speakers and don't know much about them.

I guess a general caution, usually those "theatre in a box" packages with the reeealy tiny sattelite speakers and the sub in the corner of the room aren't very good. From B&W I am sure such a system might be better than most, but still, the purpose of such a system is usually lower price, smaller, good looking, with sound quality taking a rear seat.

From the looks of the MT series, it looks like one such system? But I really have no firsthand info, maybe it is very good after all for the money.

Someone mentioned Monitor Audio and they make very good speakers for the money and usually can undercut B&W for price.

I would say, if you have time, demo as MANY speakers as you can from all over town before you spend that kinda money (if you care) and find the ones that appeal to you the most. Always insist on playing music you know and love when demoing; bring it with you on CD when you go to the store.

Also, if you are at all interested in seeing whats available from reputable internet-base companies, check out av123.com or ascendacoustics.com or audioc.com, three of my favourite internet companies.

A good forum to learn about home theatre is avsforum.com

Mex99,

While you are still in the shopping mode, check out the Yamaha YSP-1100SL Digital Sound Projector.

I put one in our system awhile back and we love it. It can be easily wall mounted. Of course it is not true surround, but what the speaker system lacks in realism, it more than makes up in simplicity and ease of installation. I have gotten sick of cable runs, plaster repairs, etc.

Got mine from Amazon, but there are a bunch on ebay too.

__________________
Cayman S – A Six Cylinder Symphony

When I was shopping for a flat panel last year, I couldn't believe how horribly the screens were displayed at most places. Get thee to a high-end video place as they are most likely to have the displays calibrated properly.

Plasma vs. LCD:
I and a friend of mine both have Comcast HD. He has a 1080p Sony LCD display. I have a Panny 1080i display. I can say without a doubt that I like the image on the plasma screen. Every time I watch the LCD, I can see the individual pixels. I am not talking about any bandwidth issue here. If I didn't know better, I'd say the LCD was running at 16 bit color vs. 24 or 32 bit on the Plasma. I don't know if it's an image processor issue on the LCD, but I would never want the Sony LCD that my friend has.

This is of course my personal opinion.

You raise a very good point. You have to watch out for crappy signal processing, particularly for gamma and color space, because there are a lot of moron or cheapskate engineers out there. Example: a while back (1990s) Panasonic introduced a pro editing VCR and a camcorder with fancy buzzword-laden digital signal processing that was supposed to make them a quantum leap. Pretty expensive, $8k VCR and $12k camcorder (with lens). But they used 8 bits/channel (24 bit total) color processing, and I can report from personal experience that it looks like dog shihtzu.

So add another absolute-must-have: the internal processing of the display has to be floating point or at least 10 bits/channel, 30 bits total, and the native display color resolution needs to be at least true 24 bit, and preferably true 30 bit.

Sometimes these vital statistics are a PITA to pin down, and salesmen will mostly be useless, but the Internet is your friend here. If you identify a particular display that you think is the one, run it by us here.

I'm not real wild about that advice, but it all depends on your goals, budget etc.

TV set - plasmas are vulnerable to burn-in, gradual deterioration of PQ, are very heavy, emit a lot of heat, and consume a lot of power. I have 3 Samsung TV's, 2 DLP's and an LCD. I like LCD for wall mount apps, DLP's where you don't need the thin form factor.

I recently decided on Blu-Ray, b/c it's technically superior, all but one or two movie studios are now supporting it, and the market appears to be going that direction. HD-DVD has much lower studio support. I bought a PS3, and got a great gaming/multimedia system in addition to Blu-Ray!

I've also just upgraded 2 receivers in my home to Onkyos, and am impressed w/ their features and performance for the price. Make sure you have enough HDMI inputs and outputs for future expansion possibilities.

As for speakers, you just have to listen, and be sure you can return them, since how they sound in the environment you install them in is critical.

__________________
'07 Guards Red Cayman S
'08 Honda Ridgeline RTL
'99 Miata 10th Anniversary Edition
'07 KTM Super Duke 990
'07 KTM 300 XC-W / '06 KTM 450 XC