Setting up the new surround sound system

The audio stuff mostly came yesterday. Of course, on Tuesdays I don't have time to play with new toys, and I suspected that starting to play with this would leave the living room discombobulated and I need to be able to have people there on Tuesday night. So I just unpacked the boxes and put things roughly where they're going to go and left it for later.

Another issue is that the speaker cable I ordered with the new toys isn't coming tomorrow.

But setting up my new toys was what I really wanted to do, and it paralyzed me in terms of thinking up something else to write about here this morning, so I decided to go see if I had speaker cable in the audio cables box, and of course I did.

So I bit the bullet and unplugged everything from the old receiver and put the new receiver up and started plugging things in. Getting the two existing speakers and the radio antennas plugged in and getting stereo radio was trivial.

Plugging in the three (center and 2 surround) new speakers turned out to be pretty easy, and now the sound from the radio was coming out of five speakers.

It was easier after I discovered that you can actually see the hole you need to put the speaker wire through if you put the speaker on its face, instead of trying to wire it in place. I'm not sure who came up with the idea of connecting speakers to speaker wire by threading the wire through an invisible hole. I think long-term it works better than the screws used to, but the screws are really easier.

The subwoofer turns out to connect to the receiver via some kind of plug I don't have, so I couldn't connect that. I hope I can figure out what the name of the plug is, and get one that I can connect to the speaker wire. The stuff that's coming tomorrow is coming with some plugs, but I'm pretty sure they aren't the right kind.

So on to connecting program sources. I started with the TV set. Ultimately I probably want to get some HDMI cables and connect everything that way, but I started by just plugging the cable box into the TV the way it was before this exercise and connecting the TV to an analog audio input on the receiver. I was only getting sound through the two old speakers when I did that, so I fiddled with options on the TV set menu, and stopped getting sound through the receiver at all. I think I probably told it I was using the digital out, and since I'm not, it isn't sending the sound out the analog out and so the receiver isn't getting any. I'll go downstairs with a digital cable soon and check this out.

I have one hdmi cable, and I decided to use that to connect the new blu-ray disk player to the TV set. This is working (minus the sound), but I wasn't able to check out the netflix, because the remote doesn't seem to be doing anything. And of course it's the kind of minimalist box with one button for power, and everything else you do with the remote.

So basically, after a couple of hours work, I have less stuff working than I did when I started, but it looks like all the hardware is working right, and I just have to get it connected right.

I'll let you know how I like surround sound when I actually get some.

Related posts:

1. Hooking up surround sound, part two
2. Last post about setting up the new home theater
3. How I like the surround sound