Home Theater

This may not interest anyone, but after screwing around for most of day with this mess I thought I better make some notes.

We are still decompressing from the big remodel project. We moved into the basement while the upstairs was being remodeled. This resulted in all kinds of stuff being squirreled away into all kinds of corners.

One of the things that got squirreled away was the Wireless surround speakers for the Panasonic Home Theater Sound System. I came across them this week and set them up. Everything seems copasetic, the pilot light changes from red to green, but I'm not getting any sound. Start investigating and find that I'm not getting any sound from any of the speakers. All the sound we're getting is from the speakers in the TV. Huh. Either those speakers are very good or maybe they're just good enough for us.

Well, if we've got this sound system, it ought to be working, so I set to work sorting things out.

There were only three cables plugged into the back of the TV: one power line and two signal (HDMI) cables. One goes to the ROKU box and one goes to an HDMI switch. If we're using the ROKU there's no path for the audio to get to the Sound System, so I needed to add a pair of audio cables. The audio cables I found included a third cable with yellow plugs for video. Plug that one in and nothing works. Fine, just the two audio cables then.

After much mucking around, I think I have it all sorted. We have 5 remote controls

1. ROKU
2. HDMI Switch
3. TV
4. Panasonic DVD Changer and Home Theater Sound System
5. LG Blue Ray Player

We can watch:

• Netflix vid ROKU
• DVDs using the Panasonic Changer
• BlueRay disks using the LG Player

The HDMI Switch has 5 channels:

1. Not in use
2. Not in use
3. Panasonic DVD Changer and Home Theater Sound System
4. LG Blue Ray Player
5. Not in use

To get Home Theater to listen to the signal coming in over the audio input jacks, you need to switch the TV to AUX. On the TV remote control, use the TV/VIDEO button just to the left of the MENU button which is just above the big round tilt-o-whirl cursor keys. If you try and use the Home Theater System for anything besides just audio, it will get confused and refuse to listen to the audio signal. Pressing the button on TV remote seems to get it unstuck, even though it is not connected. 

Well, I guess 'connected' doesn't mean what I think it means. The DVD player is plugged in the HDMI switch and the switch is plugged into the TV, so I supposed there could be some feedback signals running from the TV back to the player even though the switch has been changed to connect the LG player.

If we are just watching something from ROKU, we only need two remotes: the one for the ROKU for video play functions, and the Home Theater one for volume control. Maybe I should look for a fancy one that could replace all of these.