My Home Theatre

Receiver

The Sony STR-DA50ES. 100W per channel, lots of cool features.

Originally I was quoted up around the $1900 mark for this baby, and I had managed to talk the local Retravision salesman down to $1450. A week or two went by while the guy was on holidays, and when he returned, he acted as if he'd never offered it to me for that price at all. Eventually he muttered something about possibly being able to offer me an ex-demo model for that price. That was when I decided to look at prices in the city, and found Trevor Lees Audio. $1350 brand new!

Speakers

Five TLA120 speakers, also from Trevor Lees.

Having the same model speaker all the way around makes for a nice, balanced surround experience. These speakers carry the bass very well, and also deliver crisp, clear high-end sounds.

Subwoofer

Richter's Thor MkII.

Picked it up from the local dealer for $899. A great sounding (well, feeling) 165W sub with a frequency range of 18-150Hz (according to the manual). I cannot believe how much a subwoofer can add to the depth of sound - I missed out for so long!

Television

A Loewe Xelos 5381ZW 80cm widescreen TV.

'Nuff said!!!

DVD

The Denon DVD-1600.

I've been through a lot with DVD players. My first Philips player was great, but I gave it to my brother as a Christmas present when last I upgraded. The next player I owned, a Yamaha DVD-S510, was pretty good, but it had a fault which prevented it from playing certain disks. I spent two months trying to get a refund from Retravision, and when I finally did I ordered this baby from somewhere else.

This is one hell of a player: DVD Video and DVD Audio, CD, MP3 . . . you name it, it does it. Great stuff.

Click here for a list of my DVDs, care of the excellent DVD Collector

VCR

An old Panasonic ND-HV670 stereo model.

Does the job nicely, especially considering how rarely I watch tapes.

CD Player

A Sony CDP-CE235 5-disk changer.

Nice little unit: Optical output (great for DTS disks), disk exchange system (so you can change the other 4 disks while one is playing), good sound.

At some stage I'll make up a list of my CDs, but it's going to be an arduous task! :-)

Console

Yep, I'm an Xbox owner. Guilty as charged. Doesn't get played as often as I'd like, but with 5.1 sound and RGB connectivity to the TV (via the passthrough connection on the DVD player) who could ask for more in a console?

Set-Top Box

A Strong 5290 digital-tv set-top box. This baby has an 80GB internal hard-drive, meaning that it can record up to 28 hours of tv. It also has 'time-shifting' capabilities, meaning that you can 'pause' live tv and come back to it later (the box records the bits you miss while you're away.

Cables

Just wanted to put a special entry here for my new QED SQART cable, which cost big bucks but was worth every penny. This is one hell of a cable. You could hang this baby on the wall and people would ooh and aah over it!