So Thanksgiving break came and went and I can say one good thing came out of it. After much goading and a little monetary persuasion from everyone else, my dad finally decided it was time to upgrade to a nice, big honking HDTV. Taking advantage of a fairly nice Circuit City Black Friday sale, we got the 46″ Sony Bravia with a Bluray player thrown in. Overall we spent a bit under two grand but I must say it was totally worth it. Played “I Am Legend” on the Bluray and it upscaled it very nicely. Pure AWESOME. Tossed my 360 on it and the dashboard looked great. Didn’t get to play and games though /cry. Basically spent the rest of Friday after sleeping from the way too early doorbuster sale setting up the TV.

Then spent most of Saturday setting up the 5.1 system my mum bought as a surprise for my dad. She sorta dropped it on me when she asked me what good deals there were so I had to make a clutch decision and we ended up getting the Sony Bravia 5.1 system. Sony’s well known for their exceptional TVs. What they aren’t known for are their speakers and receivers. And for good reason cause these things sucked. Took me about an hourish to set up and calibrate. Then when we tried it out didn’t sound all that bad. Decent fronts and centers. Sub was passable, but the sides were horrible. Could barely hear a whisper out of them. Then we also found out how bad the packed in receiver was. You couldn’t even plug other components into it! So that meant no surround sound for the Bluray, 360, and anything else we wanted to plug in! Horrid! So that’s all my fault for making such a horrible decision on the fly.

Sadly I had to pack up and leave to get back to North Carolina for classes so basically my mum and sis had to put everything back into the box which was probably an ordeal since I did all the setting up. Luckily though we were able to get a full refund. So this whole past week I’ve been lurking all the Audio/Visual forums looking around. Found that the best thing to do was actually buy everything separately starting with the fronts and the sub then building up from there. So I started looking around for some good fronts and found that a good/passable pair cost around 200-300 bucks. For a /passable/ pair! So I said screw it and instead started looking around at home theater systems. But I quickly gave up on that as well since I didn’t really see anything I could find that matched what I wanted to do.

Later on that week (pretty much yesterday) I was looking at receivers that were in our price range and had a shit ton of inputs. Came upon the Onkyo TX-SR506. Not a bad price and enough inputs to fit our need. Looked it up at the A/V sites and found out that the TX-SR606 while 200 more is better by leaps and bounds. Most importantly it’ll allow you to use real HD audio processing while the 506 didn’t. Didn’t really think that was much of a selling point, but then I discovered that the 606 has a surround sound package called the HT-S7100 for just 200 more totaling out to be $899 MSRP. Sadly though that is way more than we had wanted to spend. Looked around for some deals but the lowest I could find it was $699 which while a good discount was still too much. So dejected I kept looking around at other systems.

Then today I was looking around at Newegg thinking ’bout building an HTPC (Home Theater PC) and saw on their homepage “Onkyo sales!” or something to that effect. So I was like “Buh-whaaa?” and clicked. And I found the HT-S7100 on sale for $300!! And it was down to $599, right at the upper cusp of our price range. So called my mom and we bought that shit up! Won’t get there till next week and I won’t get there till the week after that, but I can’t wait! Uber excited to go back home and break in everything. It’s gonna be one sweet Christmas vacation.