This past Friday I got tired of having audio problems with my home theater system. The picture is wonderful (though I'm sure it would look better on a 42” plasma TV :) but the audio is sometimes faint and we have to really turn it up to hear it. During normal TV viewing, we leave the volume around -34 with super surround sound turned on and that is plenty. However, Friday night is the best night of TV with Stargate SG1 and the new Battlestar Galactica. These great dramas have wonderfully written story lines and dialog that you just want to hear every word. Problem is, even at -24 I still can't hear every word! And they are broadcast in Dolby Digital!
So, on a whim and with the belief that I could actually do something about this, I lifted and turned my entertainment center 90° and started playing with the wiring. I bought this thing in November of 2002, so it had been a while since I was “back there”. I noticed two flimsy cables going from the TV to the theater box, whereas everything going to and from the VCR were Monster Cables. Could these problems that have been abound for nearly 3 years be due to cable itself?
In a word, yep!
The flimsy cables were my TV audio out, which is what drives the entertainment center audio. DVD and VCR playback never really had audio problems, so this made sense. I re-routed things around so that the TV audio out had monster cables direct to the entertainment center, and sure enough I could hear every word on my favorite shows. Just servers as a reminder that a system is only as good as its weakest (or, in this case, cheapest) link.