It seems everyone has an opinion or two about home theater these days. In overhearing others speak, and reading magazines unrelated to home theater attempting to offer ill-advised nuggets of home theater knowledge, I’ve become more than upset at the rampant misinformation being spewed out into the consumers’ minds.

Others may be offering advice, but it’s in your best interest to do a little hunting and research yourself. You’ll either be surprised by your friend or magazine’s lack of knowledge, or so reinforced by their honesty and breadth of knowledge that you’ll be able to trust them even more.

One-on-One
People having a conversation between individuals is one thing, and less a cause of concern. An individual with any amount of home theater knowledge will likely be dubbed “the expert among us” in almost any circle of friends, and that individual is usually relied heavily upon by friends and family to help steer their home electronics purchases.

These people are great in that they have the best chance at getting you what you want because they know you and your personal needs better than any salesperson.

Even though this may be a trusted friend or colleague, with every bit advice you get from any source it’s always best to do at least one “solo” trip to a store that has a knowledgeable sales staff (like Tweeter or your local home theater hut) to see what their opinions are.

It never hurts to make sure the home theater guru you know is steering you the right direction no matter how trusted they are. Nothing is worse than someone else holding back your home theater aspirations by their lack of knowledge, integrity, or in some cases jealousy of wanting to always have the better system.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t trust your closest adviser, but misperceptions, myths, and bias permeate everyone’s opinions in some degree or another. It’s become common acceptance to display opinion in a factual matter (just look at the news), and it gets harder for consumers to make heads or tails of what’s fact, and what’s fiction.

Once you’ve checked out the validity of the expert advice, you’ll know whether to trust and appreciate them more, or whether to take their opinion with a grain of salt.

The Worst Advice: Incompetent Media Coverage
There are trusted media outlets, web sites, and magazines which have absolutely no ties to home theater in their content that are trying to offer tidbits of home theater advice to their viewers and readers. As if home theater advice wasn’t hard enough for the average consumer to get without another inept reviewer adding to the confusion.

More often than not, these are the worst pieces of advice one can get as they tend to fall either into the trap of misperceptions and myths backed by no knowledgeable follow-up, or the reviewers over-simplify by trying to “talk-down” to what they deem to be their readers comprehension level.

What’s worse is that many of these media outlets are trusted and highly respected among their viewership, and the viewers’ trust in the media outlets true content is transferred onto the supposed home theater advice. So not only does the consumer get bad info, they get bad info from a trusted source that they are more likely to believe to be true.

The Worst Example Yet
Money Magazine has been the most recent and worst cases of this happening, resulting in my subscription cancellation to the magazine. In the May 2004 issue they talked about the lowdown on HDTVs in the article “The Big Picture” written by Ted C. Fishman. The reviewer rates each type of TV technology, but in doing so is flatly wrong and spews opinion around with bold blanket statements and generalizations, without giving the reader any good advice.

The reviewer only got one thing right in that CRT based direct view TVs offer the best picture quality. From that point on, the review went right off a cliff with myths, misperceptions, and rumor used for the rest of the article.

He states,  “Today’s rear-projection TVs take up less space than the older cathode-ray-tube projection sets and have better picture quality.” In reality, the new technologies of DLP, LCD, and L-COS do offer slimmer boxes, but offer much less video quality. Also, the huge current sales numbers of CRT RPTVs recind the author’s pathetic notion the CRT driven RPTVs are not part of, “today’s rear-projection TVs…”.

The reviewer also continues, “The new rear-projection TVs are nothing like their forebears, those old tavern staples that relied on three cathode-ray guns beaming blue, green and red to form images on the screen--often so skewed that they produced rainbow effects.” The reviewer unjustifiably dismisses the entire lineup of CRT driven RPTVs as uncoverged crap, citing a memory of TVs in a bar the reviewer must of frequented that sounded like he hadn’t actually seen a CRT RPTV since the 80s.

All that any consumer needs to do is take their favorite DVD to a home theater shop of their choice and preview it a CRT driven RPTV and compare the image quality to any DLP, LCD, or L-COS TV at any price, and they’ll see the color gradient smoothness, and digitization issues these new RPTV technologies suffer from that CRTs don’t. With these TVs the consumer makes a judgement call as to what is more important, size or quality. The new technologies offer a different form factor, but they by no means offer better video quality as the Money Magazine article suggests.

Instead, the reviewer continues with stating that DLP and LCD TVs are the next step after direct view TVs, with Plasma as the next step beyond that offering the best picture quality above all.

So according to the reviewer, you should either buy a direct view TV for $2000 or less, or buy an LCD, DLP or Plasma TV for $4000+. Since when has the electronics industry left that huge a gap where the consumer has nothing to choose from?

Talk about being out of touch with reality. CRT RPTVs still offer the best picture quality and screen size, easily beating out any DLP, LCD, and Plasma TV with the exception of the form factor of the TVs. Thin is cool, but if you want picture quality that is unbeatable, CRT is still the best display technology and rightly so due to over 70 years of technological improvements and research. Dismissing the entire CRT RPTV technology is presumptive, and has no bearing on the truth or accuracy. The Money Magazine reviewer obviously made up his mind from looks alone, and not actual head-to-head comparisons in picture quality.

The Money reviewer shows his lack of knowledge in leaps and bounds. It sounds like Money asked some office worker “hey if you know about home theater, write an article about HDTVs”. You’d think the magazine could afford a real home theater expert, but obviously not. From my perspective this lack of fact checking and detail detracts from the trustworthiness of the other content offered in the magazine, but that’s just my opinion.

Sadly, this is but one detailed example of many instances wherein bad advice is spewed upon media outlet readers in a subject they shouldn’t even be writing about, or a least when they do they should at least hire competent reviewers or sources.

Media Responsibility
It’s the responsibility of trusted media outlets to ensure that the supplemental content they offer as home theater advice is true by at least running the content by more than one supposed expert in the field. Better yet, leave home theater advice to magazines and web sites that specifically write about the subject that are more in-the-know, can see through the myths and misconceptions, and can actually help their readers grasp home theater technology better.

In short, to all those reviewers who rely strictly and myths and misconceptions and try to impart your lack of wisdom on the world… shut-up and let the competent reviewers handle it, or at least do some reading, comparing, evaluating and check your source. You’re bad for consumers, bad for the industry, and we’ll all get by a lot better without your nuggets of misperception muddying the waters.

Great sources of home theater information include:

• Home Theater Magazine
• The Perfect Vision
• Stereophile Guide to Home Theater
• The Absolute Sound
• Sound and Vision Magazine

All of the above resources offer differing points of view on home theater with equally different breadths of content. While some may be high-end or low-end, they all offer great advice based upon fact-finding reviews and comparisons, rather than simplistic myths and misperceptions, which tend to be the rule rather than the exception of what other media outlets pass off as home theater knowledge.

The above list of resources are by no means the only good HT resources available, there are many online home theater forums and other magazines that offer great content as well. The above resources are merely a suggested starting point of content you can trust to offer an open and honest opinion, and from which you can expand your knowledge of home theater.

Summary
With everyone vying to offer advice on what is seen by many consumers as “mysteriously-hard-to-setup” home theater technology, media outlets that should not be writing about home theater in the first place are offering misinformation and misperceptions instead of accurate and detailed reviews. Any review that’s not written by a trusted resource should be looked upon with skepticism unless others prove the same point.