Home Theater Upgrade

Michael McNamara — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 18:12:23 +0000

Over the holidays I decided it was time to upgrade the home theater equipment in my basement. At the center of my old setup was a Hitachi 51SWX20B 51″ rear projection TV that I purchased back in 2003. Unfortunately it only has 2 DVI ports and one of them failed about 5 years ago. I purchased the Samsung 65″ LED Smart 4K Ultra HD TV (UN65KS8000FXZA) from Best Buy along with a Whalen Furniture 3-in-1 Console furniture set. I didn’t want to go through the headache of hanging the TV on the wall and still needed somewhere to put all the audio/video equipment including the Onkyo TX-SR600 A/V Receiver, Verizon FiOS HDTV tuner and new Samsung BD-J6300 Blu-Ray player that I picked up from Amazon. I chose the BD-J6300 because it had a digital TOSLINK output and supported Dolby 5.1 surround sound. The Whalen furniture took about 90 minutes to assemble all total, the instructions were good the piece looks pretty good.

Overall I’m happy with the TV, and really happy with the Whalen furniture. The Smart TV functionality includes Amazon Video, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and HBO Now along with a built in web browser.

Perhaps I’ll get a chance to replace the Onkyo TX-SR600 over the next few years.

Cheers!

Verizon FiOS TV Channel Re-alignment

Michael McNamara — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:00:12 +0000

It appears that Verizon is going to be performing a channel re-alignment on September 11, 2008 here in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. I know there have been all sorts of discussions on the Internet about the date, some receiving notification that the date of the conversion was September 2 and some September 11. I just noticed on the FiOS TV Guide this morning that almost all the channels now list their “new” channel number along with the date that the channel will change (move).

In a recent post I mentioned how Verizon was doing away with all the analog channels. They were doing this for a number of reasons, one obvious reason was to meet the government’s mandate of going all digital by February 2009, and another was to help free up “space” for additional HD stations. I believe there are suppose to be quite a few new HD stations added in the channel re-alignment.

I’ve also heard quite a bit of discussion about the terrible compression that Comcast is currently inflicting on a great many of their HD channels. If you have FiOS TV/Internet service available in your area I would suggest you strongly consider making the switch. I’ve been very pleased with the service and reliability to date.

Cheers!

Update: Wednesday September 10, 2008
I’ve managed to locate the new TV channel lineup for Southeastern Pennsylvania on Verizon’s website.

Update: Thursday September 18, 2008
The channel re-alignment occurred just as promised. I’m fairly pleased with the new channel lineup and I hear that there are going to be quite a few new HD channels added in the coming months so I’m really excited.