It’s easy to caught up in the upgrade and improvement bubble wherein your home theater is in constant flux. This is especially true when it comes to Blu-Ray versus DVD now that HD-DVD is gone. For home theater nuts, it’s a never-ending love… until, that is, you reach your personal home theater nirvana.

The nirvana moment may never come unless you take a step back to realize how good the home theater you’ve built actually is. How good? Try way better than theater quality!

TV makers have added tons of new features, high-resolution capabilities, computer connectivity, and vast image quality improvements in their TVs. Despite all the improvements, they all miss the mark on one issue that is totally destroying the picture quality regardless of the latest technology… picture geometry.

Picture geometry is nowhere near as sexy on an ad as “1080p”, “screen size”, or “flat panel”, but it is the one issue I commonly see at trade shows, friends homes, and even in my own home from time to time. At issue is the incorrect screen mode being used to display content.

Blu-ray has won the high-definition DVD war. Honestly both HD-DVD and Blu-ray offered high-quality HD movies and it was a total shame that the war had to occur in the first place. The animosity of consumers in online forums was unprecedented as they argued for whichever format they “invested” in.

I was on neither side as I was willing to buy both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. About five times in the last year I was really close to buying a standalone Sony Blu-ray player. I did get an HD-DVD player, but I got it on the cheap at $150 (at the time the cheapest player was $299) as an X-Box 360 add-on.

These two high-definition DVD formats have been battling for a couple years now and after living with HD-DVD for the better part of a year I can honestly say I’m not impressed. The image and sound is better on HD-DVD than on standard DVD, but not so much so that I’m willing to spend 2-3 times as much on new releases for the benefit. At $30-$40 per new release movie, the value proposition just fails. With every movie not available on both high-def formats, I’ll be watching my standard DVD collection for a long time.

Preplanning may seem like an obvious notion, but the excitement of building a home theater brings with it the impatience to enjoy the fruits of your labors. You can save time, aggravation, and costly mistakes by taking a little time to plan how your equipment will work/grow in your room, weighing room design decisions, and evaluating equipment for your home theater.

Consumers plan, research, and finally purchase home theater equipment every day. It can be easy to think the gear you bought was perfect since you spent time and researched the product. In the highly competitive home theater market things can happen that can make equipment break, and price is not always an indicator of quality.

Sometimes it can be hard to justify the cost of a home theater to a significant other. Despite the obvious advancement in picture and sound quality offered by home theater sometimes a long hard look at the money you’ll save by being entertained at home can open up your finance committee’s purse strings.

For home theater enthusiasts HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray is a strong debate with those who bought into either format spouting off why their chosen format is better. For the normal home theater consumer though there may be no debate as the DVD format is so pervasive, and looks great on most any HDTV.

Home Theater is invariably complex. Multiple components connected together to a TV with enough remotes and connection types to drive a normal person mad. Add HDTV with its multiple aspect ratios that need to be changed depending on the source material, and you can see why there are tons of web sites, magazines, and forums which attempt to help people find the right components and get the most from what they have.

A long time ago a theater was a special place to go with elegant settings, and respect among theater attendees that it indeed was a special event. Theaters now deliver the best picture quality and sound they ever have, but the experience is about as great as shopping for groceries.

Created in the early 90s and released as a consumer product in 1996, DVD has been around a while. While 10+ years is a long time for any format, the standard-definition DVD format continues to offer astounding picture quality on both standard-definition TVs and large widescreen HDTVs. With all the talk and hype about Blu-ray and HD-DVD one would think that DVD will soon be obsolete, but that couldn’t further from the truth.

I’ve used an older Apple PowerBook laptop as an iTunes jukebox connected to my home theater for stereo music for over three years now. No music is actually on the PowerBook. It connects wirelessly to my main computer in the office, which houses my complete music library. Using iTunes on a laptop is perhaps one of the best ways to serve music in my opinion as having a full working iTunes application means that I can easily search and scroll through playlists and thousands of songs with ease.

Many consumers simply don’t know how long they can expect their home theater gear to last. With the expectation that consumers get from the computer industry one could easily assume that home theater gear only lasts 2-4 years at best, but that could not be further from the truth. With this knowledge you may be inclined to get equipment that can grow with you, or perhaps, lead you to spend a little more to get something that can.

Building your first home theater can seem like a daunting task. For video there are so many technologies, sizes, and price points that the options can simply overwhelm someone looking to build their first home theater. More often than not, with so much attention focused on the video side of things the audio portion is often just quickly thrown together. Assembling the audio portion of your first home theater can make or break your upgrade options in the future.

No doubt many of you out there have purchased or received home theater over the holidays, or know friends or family members who have. For many newbies out there, you may not know how easy it is to get the most from your new system. A few quick tips can make a world of difference in how your new home theater equipment performs. For those of you who know a bit about home theater you can help your friends and family out with these quick tips.

I recently jumped head long into the high-definition DVD format mix when I picked up an HD-DVD drive addition to the X-Box 360. I ran into absolutely no hardware issues as the drive worked flawlessly, but my experience with actually purchasing content was a major source of frustration.

Over the last year the industry has been touting 1080p as “Full HD”. Giving the false presumption that you’re not getting the entire HD signal or worse yet, confusing consumers into thinking that anything not 1080p isn’t worth getting.

The old adage of “you pay for what you get” couldn’t be more true than it is in the home theater market today. With prices being slashed dramatically on large/big screen TVs the lure of getting the biggest screen at the smallest price is tempting, but you may regret it over time, as the reliability of the cheapest TVs may be questionable.

It goes without saying that Audiophiles love great sound quality. These are enthusiasts who can hear the audio differences that equipment and speakers can make. For these people, the MP3 format is downright crap, and many lump in the MP4 format used by default within iTunes/iPod (AAC encoding) with the sound quality of MP3, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The MP4 format can sound every bit as good or close enough to CD quality playback. Just don’t expect an iPod to do it for you if you’re an audiophile.

There’s been a growing trend to have home theater equipment act like computers, which also imparts the lack of reliability, glitches, and incompatibility normally associated with the computer industry.

There are some major changes happening in the world of TV service providers. Telephone companies, the world over, are heavily investing into providing TV service via broadband Internet connections, the new service technology is called IPTV. Over time, the Cable companies will have some stiff competition to their service offering. With telephone company provided DSL broadband being the most affordable broadband Internet solution, the telephone companies already have an “in” to many homeholds.

A home theater not only does movies, music, and TV well, but can provide an awesome gaming experience as well. The downside is that those who want to do a considerable amount of gaming need to be careful about which display technology they choose.

Consumer forums are a great resource to get the low down on home theater gear you’re looking at, and tips and tricks to get the best from what you have. Keep in mind that these are consumer forums – regular people who have an interest in talking about home theater. Just like any conversation about home theater, they’re not always right.

They’re the bane of any consumer that gets into home theater. With the great technological prowess of consumer electronics to bring the movie theater experience home, comes the unwieldy pile of remotes needed to control it all. They can all be replaced by the coveted universal remote that offers the nirvana of full control via a single remote and with so many different remotes out there it can be hard to find best one.

Since DLP came out about 5 years ago it has never offered better picture quality than CRT driven rear-projection TVs. Despite this, most manufacturers over the last three years have all but dumped CRT rear-projection TVs from their lineup in favor of DLP technology which offers a much brighter image and thinner form factor, but suffered from color issues and the nausea inducing “rainbow effect” from the spinning color wheel employed to produce color.

Consumer Alert!
CES happened and the format war has played out in the high-definition DVD market, with HD-DVD in one corner and Blu-ray in the other, each touting certain technological reasons why their format is better. At the show each group launched their product release dates and specs, and while everyone in the media’s focus has been on the format war, few have looked at the heavy-handed copy protection schemes employed by both formats.

We home theater enthusiasts read a lot of magazines, web sites, and message boards about home theater. I was dismayed while reading some of the industry leading magazines as they were ripping the truthfulness of online content about home theater.

I while ago I was at a bar with a few friends and acquaintances thereof. One of my close friends is always bellowing about how great my home theater is. Another home theater buff whom my friend had obviously known and previously talked to about the matter comes up to me and questions me…

#1 – The New iPods, The Best Made Better ($200 – $400)
The iPod was and is the #1 portable music player in the world and with good reason. Only Apple has seamlessly integrated the interface, music management, connection, and music store into an effortless cohesion of what would otherwise be four completely separate applications.

Home theaters come in all shapes and sizes depending on the room, personal desire, budget, and a host of many other factors. Most would assume that unless you have a big screen and surround sound you don’t have a home theater. That’s simply not true. You could have a 27-inch TV, sit in the optimal viewing range, and use a pair of stereo speakers to bring home theater nirvana to your room.