In response to the poll, you’ve mentioned The Speaker Company speakers on a previous podcast, so I tried a pair. I liked them so much that I bought a center and surrounds, also. Thanks Tom!

For Leif, re: muddy centre speaker

in my experience, muddy sound from a centre speaker is usually due to having your seat too close to the rear wall. Many people have their couch pushed right up against the back wall and this causes all sorts of audio problems. In simple terms, the sound from your centre speaker is bouncing off of the wall behind you. And since that wall is so close, the reflected sound is very strong, causing the centre channel as a whole to sound muddy and indistinct. I do not know if this is the case for Leif, but some easy advice is to try and always pull your seat away from the rear wall and/or to put some absorption directly behind you 🙂

I’m getting more and more into using “pro” gear in the home theatre. The level of performance for the price is just so much better in a lot of cases.

As Tom pointed out, a pro monitor will often be a rather “bare bones” display. But so long as you can provide your own speakers, your own mount and you can work with the typically smaller selection of inputs, the actual display quality itself is usually very high – especially for the price. This was basically the case fir the Pioneer KRP-600M that I bought. It was mostly intended as a “commercial” display. The kind they would use for a newsroom or an entertainment TV show or an airport – that sort of thing.

In audio, pro gear holds tremendous value as well. Studio monitors are almost always made to be as accurate and linear as possible. Something like the Behringer B2030P audio monitor offers absolutely amazing sound quality for its very low price. Pro audio speakers are often very plain-looking and often physically larger and more boxy. But if accurate sound reproduction is your only goal, it’s awfully hard to beat the value offered by pro studio monitor speakers.

I used to design and setup media classrooms at a university. When we used Professional Display’s and Projectors we could care less about the internal scaling, speakers, number of connections. We always used External video scalers. And as long as the monitors had a HDMI or BNC connections we were good to go.
When we compared internal to external scalers a few yrs ago, it was no contest. External was the way to go.

We used mostly all Anchorbay products.

It would be interesting to see a audioholics shoot out on scalers.

Anyways, keep up the good work.

Just a little info on the Sky service added to the Xbox 360, This is the UK’s and Ireland’s Satellite HD + TV provider, they do some radio on there also, love the show folk’s!