For the past 15 years my "home cinema" setup has been a 55 inch Sony LED TV and an all-in-one Sony 5.1 Surround sound system with integrated Bluray player. Additionally there is a Linux VDR for FTA satellite broadcasts, and a Xiaomi Mibox streaming client.

Since "the better is the enemy of the good" a good deal on a 65 inch 4k TV popped up (thanks again, you know who you are!) and this set in motion the vicious upgrade cycle we all know and fear. So now that everything is done and mistakes have been made, here's an overview of the equipment and a few thoughts.

Note: I am not providing links to any of the equipment mentioned in here. Links change, suppliers do as well. So please just search using your favorite means.

Sony BDV-E870

This is the system that was replaced. It is a compact unit with integrated amplifiers for all 6 channels and a built-in HD DVD/BD player. It only has a single HDMI connector with ARC (audio return channel), so all sound playback is dependent on this connection to function. Which it did until maybe a year ago when spurious disconnections started happening, eventually increasing in frequency to the point that sound playback was really only possible when playing a disk.

Additionally with Java-based software running on dated hardware it was anything but a joy to use. And of course no 4k. On the upside it was unobtrusive, easy to wire up, and sounded really decent except for the front speakers. More on that later.

Following is the rundown of the new equipment.

Samsung GQ65QN 4k TV

The device that started it all. Every TV on the market these days claims to be a "smart" one, and so is this. Luckily it is fully functional without any network connection whatsoever. The only caveat is that sound calibration is not possible, but with the back-mounted speakers sounding halfway useful and probably not improving much anyways that's ok. Otherwise there are no nag screens, periodic reminders of "missing out", and no built-in ads either. Very good!

The TV has a total of 4 HDMI inputs, one with eARC, several USB ports, and a digital optical Toslink port.

The 4 HDMI ports are just sufficient with the VDR, Bluray player, streaming box, and the AVR all finding their place. The USB ports are surprisingly useful, allowing thumb drives and disks to be attached and music, pictures, and video play back just fine through a reasonable file browser interface with previews. All kinds of codecs are supported (crucially, mp4 and flac), and the ports provide enough power to run an Icybox RAID enclosure with dual SSDs.

With all media players being connected to the TV it's not necessary to run the AVR all the time, such as when just watching the news. It saves a bit of power and reduces the mess of remote controls to be juggled at least.

All around the TV is a very nice device even though it's not an OLED screen. Black level, color, and brightness are still way above what's needed in a normal room.

Denon AVR S970H 7.2 8k Surround Receiver

There is a plethora of Surround receivers on the market, and things change every day. I picked this specific model because it supports HDR10 and Dolby Atmos, 8k resolution, and has enough HDMI inputs and audio output channels in case they're needed in the future. It boots up in 5 seconds and sounds very good.

The AVR will produce an HDMI signal on its output only when the "Setup" button is pressed. This then allows to configure settings, including calibrating the speaker output with the included microphone, but otherwise provides little useful information and no way to interact with the device. It would have been nice to have a way to switch sound modes or inputs. The fact the video signal comes and goes also confuses the TV somewhat, with the automatic device identification through HDMI being triggered needlessly.

Network Analysis

The customary update check after initial powerup showed the device to be connecting to various AWS endpoints and then downloading an update for almost half an hour with absolutely no visual feedback. I saw network activity through my firewall so let it do its thing, but less patient people may have powercycled it already. Word of caution.

LG UBK90 4k Bluray Disk Player

Disk players are not a happy subject, Vinyl as well as optical. The number of devices on the market is dwindling, what is available is either cheap and without quality control or over-the-top expensive collectors stuff. Faced with the dominance of streaming services few companies show any interest in improving the situation. With vinyl players at least one can hope to find a good old-stock device from the 80s and 90s, but of course supply is shrinking every day.

As of April 2024 the affordable candidates were various Panasonic models, several devices from Sony, and essentially two LG models. Both Sony and Panasonic were riddled with QC issues, with people returning products multiple times until they finally received one that worked satisfactorily.

Which left LG and their UBK80 and UBK90 players. The 80 is a scaled-down cheaper version of the 90, losing the second audio-only HDMI output and being stripped of Dolby Atmos support to save the license money. The 90 was getting hard to find so I was happy to snatch one up from an online seller.

I've had multiple LG devices, all of which work well, and the player is no exception. But it is still a quite limited device. The remote only works within a rather narrow angle. There is no LCD display of any kind on the front. The on-screen menu is a vast area of nothingness with a few basic functions, and any advanced functionality such as region selection or disabling user prohibitions are absent. What it does do well is play disks, jumping back and forth between scenes and chapters is very fluid, it boots up quickly, and the drive is nearly completely silent. So far there have been no playback or sound issues.

Network Analysis

I gave the player network access to check for updates and and see what online services might be on offer. There wasn't much. The built-in browser doesn't work and it does seem to be an old version of Opera. The only surprising thing was a lookup for whitehouse.gov - wonder if that's a prank or what. Anyway it doesn't need to be on the network so it isn't.

info: 192.168.6.138 pool.ntp.org. AAAA IN NOERROR 0.027343 0 85
info: 192.168.6.138 www.lge.com. A IN NOERROR 0.000000 1 90
info: 192.168.6.138 www.whitehouse.gov. A IN NOERROR 0.000000 1 81
info: 192.168.6.138 xml.opera.com. A IN NOERROR 0.025744 0 63
info: 192.168.6.138 sdklog.tvstore.opera.com. A IN NOERROR 0.081610 0 165

Here's a picture of the setup inside my AV cart. Luckily all the cabling is hidden behind the devices of course, since there is a lot of them. The upper part of the cart swivels to be able to rotate the TV towards the dining table or the couch. The big cable hole in the back shows there's still some room above the BD player, which may eventually be filled by a Vue+ DVR once my current setup dies of old age. The CDs on the left side give a sense of scale - the AVR is quite high.

Other Equipment

Linux VDR

For watching FTA broadcasts a trusty old YaVDR system with two Hauppauge USB DVB-S1 dongles connected to a multiswitch and a multi-LNB satellite dish continues to serve. It is connected over HDMI to one of the TV inputs and works quite well. It's mostly used to record shows and store them on disk for later consumption.

Streaming Client

A Xiaomi MiBox S running Android serves as client for watching various (free) streaming services. The usual question is "why, when all other components can do some form of streaming" and the answer is privacy, ad-blocking, and tunneling; in that order.

Privacy, because most "smart" devices incorporate some form of tracking and phone-home functionality that the user doesn't have any control over. Ad-blocking, because most services and devices nowadays will force you to watch ads and I don't want that in my living room. And lastly tunneling, because geoblocking of services is prevalent and most consumer devices do not allow you to send traffic directly through VPN tunnels. With Android devices it's easy enough to install wireguard from the app store. There's a blog post coming up on that soon.

Speakers

With the prevalence of sound bars and DSP-driven small speakers I feel not enough attention is given to speakers these days.

JBL front speakers

Immediately after unpacking the old Sony system the included tiny plastic front speakers went in the bin. There simply is no replacement for good, heavy, voluminous speakers and the ancient set of JBLs from the 80s are perfectly serviceable. This change alone improved sound quality 10 times.

Sony passive Subwoofer and Center

The system retains the original Sony subwoofer and center speakers. The Denon AVR does not support passive woofers so I purchased a separate Nobsound G2 single channel amplifier to drive it. A cinch-male to cinch-male Y-cable was also required.

The Nobsound and similar amps (such as Douk - they all seem to be made by the same OEM and sold under different brand names) come in a decent housing made from aluminum extrusion with an external power brick. Dip switches allow setting the gain, toggle switches are provided for the operating mode and power on/off, and two adjustment - well, nobs - allow setting the cutoff frequency and volume. Works well, sounds good, is a bit more faff than I would have liked.

Polk XT20 satellites

The Sony satellites were the same kind of flimsy plastic things as their original front speakers. Satellites can usually get away with less presence due to their supporting nature so they stayed until now. But the Polks are a nice upgrade and would not be out of place as solo speakers in a small Hifi setup.

They are quite hefty and so I put them on a pair of Mounting Dream MD5402-2 adjustable stands. Most stands on the market are either junk or expensive - these being the latter.

There are no provisions on the speakers for attaching the mounting hardware included with the stands so I simply drilled 4 holes into the bottom plate and used 3x12mm screws and washers to attach them.

Thoughts and Observations

This is a collection of my thoughts and a log of the learning process.

Components vs. All-in-ones

My original idea was just to replace the existing system with a 4k-capable newer version, but that simply isn't available. Going back to components probably was the right decision as anything that breaks or falls out of favor can be replaced separately in the future. Apparently that's getting to be an odd choice these days but whatever.

Modern Hardware

Coming from ancient consumer devices like the old Sony TV and BD player it is remarkable how much pain we used to tolerate. The Java software ran slow as molasses, every single function was accompanied by a second or two of lag, and most of the online services have long since gone away leaving grossly overbuilt systems with next to no functionality.

I live under no illusion this won't also be the case for current-gen stuff in another 10 years, but at least everything is comparatively fast and responsive. For now.

Streaming Functions

In case you haven't noticed elsewhere in this blog: I'm not a fan of streaming. I like owning my media and deciding on how, when, and where to consume it. I also value things like watching movies in their original languages and turning subtitles on and off myself. And I hate "adapted" versions (read: shortened to better fit commercials or edited for language).

So the streaming functions did not factor in my purchasing decisions, other than I want the devices to be fully functional without them. YMMV.

Physical Media

Purchasing physical media is, contrary to popular belief, quite straightforward and cheap. Ebay is full of large second hand sellers breaking up estate sales and shop returns and selling DVDs, BDs, CDs, and other media really cheaply. If you have a list of movies you might be interested in I suggest to create watches or otherwise search for candidates every now and then. Most HD versions of movies are available anywhere between 3 and 8 Euros shipped. 4k versions still fetch higher prices but there's nothing wrong with getting an HD version now and upgrading to 4k later.

Also it's a really nice experience to be browsing stuff in real brick-and-mortar record stores and coming home with a couple of outliers every now and then.

HD vs. 4k - Quantity vs. Quality

Resolution isn't everything. In fact a well-mastered full-HD version can be much better quality than a 4k version with throttled bandwidth to fit on a single disk.

Case in point: the 4k version of Dune I is not significantly better than any decent HD disk I own. Conversely, The Hobbit's extended 4k edition is a feast for the eyes and proves the potential of the format. But then it's half a terabyte of video data.

At this point in time I suggest shopping around for good HD versions of the movies you are interested in, and maybe splashing for the 4k editions only for things you really like while you wait for prices to drop.

An interesting corollary of this is people selling off the HD versions included with 4k movies, such as the hybrid Star Trek collections. They can be had cheaply and are still great to watch.

ARC/eARC

The enshittification of AV protocols. (Enhanced) Audio Return Channel and specifically the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) protocol are horrible, glitchy non-standards. Theoretically providing simultaneous power-on and single-remote control of compatible devices, in my experience CEC just doesn't work reliably. All the usual things like only using high quality and certified cables show little effect. If anything they lead to more glitchiness because the system works a larger (but still small) percentage of the time.

My solution to this whole disaster is to run an optical Toslink cable between the TV and the AVR which works rock solid. The CEC part is useless anyway as the AVR needs its remote with all the special buttons to properly function, and the TV doesn't really need anything other than the on/off button and input selector. Problem solved.

Active vs. Passive Subwoofer

Reusing properly working components is great. However, considering the fiddling around with gain settings and adjustments on the separate subwoofer amplifier, the external power brick which is always on, and the additional dip switches and adjustment dials I am second guessing this decision. It would have probably been more straightforward to just buy a good quality active woofer such as the Elac Debut 2.0 and be done with it. The amplifier plus cables already cost half of it. I may still do that.

Speaker Mounting

For as much money as we sink into speakers and mounts it's a bit of a shame that there's no universally accepted standards of interfacing those two things. The MD stands come with a plethora of brackets and screws, packaged in the vain hope that something will fit somehow. The Polk speakers have nothing. The Elac monitors take this even a step further and have two bass reflex tubes coming out the bottom with protruding flanges that prevent even placing them onto a shelf. Which seems odd for "shelf speakers".

So one ends up drilling holes into MDF like a caveman. Sigh.

Changes?

I say the migration is complete but there are a couple things I will maybe still change.

The first is to move all devices to the AVR inputs after all. It means the audio system always has to run, but it mostly does anyway. On the plus side the AVR remote has dedicated buttons for every single input, while the Samsung TV inexplicably forces you to go through multiple button presses and a menu to change inputs. Automatic input selection almost never works.

This would also allow to move the TV connections to the second non-eARC HDMI output to prevent situations where the TV disconnects from the CEC but keeps eARC on plus activates its own audio output which leads to nasty echo effects.

I may still replace the passive subwoofer+amplifier setup with an active one.

We'll see.