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.