Trevor

Ok, after years of living with a 42" 720p screen and rarely hooking up my ancient stereo receiver for my movie watching; I've finally upgraded a bit.

Neither purchases are "locked in", as I bought them at Costco. I hate asking for advice or researching anywhere besides DVDTalk, so am hoping for some input.

For the TV, I decided on the Samsung 55" 3D Smart 7150 series. Wanted 3D, a high clear motion rate (720) and at least 55", figured plasma was wrong for my bright living room, two grand was about my max. Open to switching, though I do love the picture and features in my very limited testing so far.

For better sound, I'm starting cheap with a home theater in a box 3D bluray player system from Sony, the N790W system with "wireless" rear speakers and nice Internet connectivity. It's a tough room to place rear speakers, I can only get them immediately behind our seats for now. Might get a better system someday, but this should be a nice upgrade over listening to just the TV speakers most of my life.

Any tips on anything? Best discs to really test my system? Do I need to "hard test" my system to burn it in or whatever that's called?

Trevor

Please?

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Why? Reflections or open windows behind the viewing area?

Spottedfeather

Well, first off, a 3D tv is waste of time and money as it's a fad that's going to die off pretty soon. The one good decision you made is not go with a plasma. They may have a better picture, but they die sooner than LCD and are more expensive to fix.

Mr. Salty

No, they don't.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

From what I've read on plasmas, the half-life is something like 20 years but it would still be bright enough. I stick with plasma since it's closer to what a CRT screen looks like. LCD has improved over the years but it still has that glazed look to it, where I wouldn't buy one for myself. I'd give one to my kid but not for me.

Pizza

I'd suggest having your rear speakers pointing straight up since, by your description, they're so close to were you are. This will help diffuse the sound around you and will sound more natural.

Spiky

Ok, I'll throw out some thoughts.
The CMR sounds great. Nice they can finally make an LCD worth looking at, and they have to throw out a new marketing "measurement" to charge more for the better models. I guess it's better than "it just looks better".

Theoretically, the 6500 series is very similar. You could save a few hundred if it is adequate to your needs.

It should be an upgrade to what you are used to. But all-in-one units worry me. If one part breaks, your whole system is gone. If your needs are very small, one of these can work. But the Bluray/receiver sets have even fewer inputs than HTiBs that are only audio. (this one actually does have more than most) So, $450 or whatever is actually not that cheap for the limited functionality and the potential for needing to replace both your disc player and audio system if just one feature breaks.
No burn in should be necessary.

I don't know what you mean by test. Some people just want to listen to surround and hear sounds everywhere, maybe play their favorite movie or music. For that, use a setup disc and make your audio as uniform as possible. A good disc will have a circular test sound, it should sound just like something spinning around you, not like 'play out of speaker 1', 'play out of speaker 2', etc. That Sony appears to have a built-in audio setup mic system. No idea how good it might be, but they really don't seem to have favorable reviews until you've spent $1000 on a receiver.

Others want to blast it as loud as possible and claim it is AWESOME!! If you want to do this, just save up and get a system that won't be destroyed when you try this. Anything "in-the-box" is not an ideal setup for this.

Spiky

Good thought. Could also be placed high, facing down.

Trevor

Thanks everyone!

Not too worried about the HTiB breaking, as Costco has lifetime returns. Been too busy building shelving and working this past week to test it all much, but will get to it tonight hopefully. More later.

Spiky

It's been 90 day returns on electronics for several years, now. Not trying to alter your decisions, but you should be aware of that.

Trevor

90 days on cameras, computers, and TVs; but still forever on other electronics.