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My beloved Sony home theater receiver succumbed to PA failure some weeks ago. It was quick and it didn’t suffer. I did. It wasn’t time for it to go - it was too young; too ready to live; too ready to serve and speak. Its siblings are still alive around the world, although they haven’t been in touch, and my premature death experience is unfair, so unfair.

Life must go on.

But what to do? What technology jump to make? In a household where cable TV is something that is unspeakable, we have satellite service, a line input and output VHS recorder/player, a 29 inch JVC TV receiver with one of the earliest S-Video inputs to be available, and a 5.1 loudspeaker system with a pair of EPI Magnus units for front left and right (so non-PC, but superb) plus miniature Sony center and rear surrounds, and a Sony sub-woofer. No terrestrial inputs are used.

It would have been easy to just replace the receiver for less than $200 and keep the system going with the other parts in situ. But, for some reason, it just felt like the right time to move ahead with HDMI in place, 1080P common, and the HD-DVD versus Blu-ray battle settled. We don’t have the complication of the move to digital in February 2009: we have been “digital” with satellite reception for many years and the only composite video we see is an occasional VHS output, which makes me cringe a little – both visually and aurally. (How can people watch images on their smart phones and be so apparently content with them?)

Within two weeks, after a painful period of listening to audio from the TV receiver (simply absolutely bloody awful) a completely new system was in place. A replacement satellite receiver now also supplies HD channels at no extra cost (the antenna had to be moved – after a wasp’s nest was dealt with – because there was no path through trees from the second bird to the correct LNB). But that Motorola receiver doesn’t provide an HDMI output (and the DVI route and lip sync problems with separate audio is not an option) so it is feeding component signals through the receiver – with optical audio as well – with separate feeds to the VHS recorder. A 7.1 channel Sony home theater receiver (only 5.1 used at the moment) feeds the same speaker system.

Also new on the scene is a 40 inch Sony LCD receiver and a Sony Blu-ray player with interlace-to-progressive conversion. (I also took the opportunity to buy one of the last VHS players available, as a standby for all those tapes that we have accumulated over the years.)

How does it all work? The 1080P pictures from the satellite are extremely good with our service provider limiting motion compression rather well. The Blu-ray output is quite simply superb (HDMI fed through the receiver) and I am incredibly impressed with Dolby’s advances in audio dynamic range and the sheer pinpointing accuracy of the channel placing. That is also reflected on DVDs replayed in the unit. The player’s slowness in booting is very frustrating, however, and if you accidentally turn it on it is a good two minutes before you can turn it off again.

HD content from the networks has been a bit disappointing with shots lined up to suit 4:3 viewing and the additional width treated like a “safe” area. PBS is much more bold about that and the video from the Detroit affiliate that provides us service is stunning. The video from the 480I channels on the satellite appear to be line-doubled-plus-a-half by Sony’s Bravia technology and we lose some image, most noticeably at the top of the display: apparent but not annoying. The technology also is rather unkind to diagonal lines which become jagged. Also it is incredibly surprising how many channels from the satellite have timing errors on their playout equipment, resulting in white vertical lines either before and/or after active video.

I was rather terrified by what the VHS composite output might look like after being processed to fill a 1080 display, but it is actually quite tolerable. The audio, in comparison to the other sources, is a rather different matter.

The changeover was forced on us but it is, quite honestly, about time for a household that has been involved in broadcast television and audio for many decades. We actually appreciate what we see and hear. A Sony death under twenty-five years old was hard to take, but that was before my spouse’s Cyber-shot digital camera pegged it a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn’t even of kindergarten age. Damn it, Sony, what are you doing!