Too Many Acronyms – Tales of a Confused Consumer
I recently bought a new home theater system, a Sony 6.1 receiver and speakers. It came in the mail yesterday, and I spent a couple of hours setting it up. (Gripe number 1: the time it takes to connect all these wires and cables…) So last night, I sat down in my recently purchased comfy chair (they don’t have the exact model I purchase on the company’s US site, so I just linked to an overview of their recliners), with a glass of some red wine from Chinon, and started listening to one of Daniel Barenboim’s riveting recitals of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. It was great; life was good.
Then I went to listen to another music DVD, this one being Mahler lieder by Thomas Hampson et al, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. While the Barenboim DVD worked fine, in luscious surround sound, the Mahler didn’t work; no sound came out of my receiver. The DVD has two audio sources, one being PCM stereo and the other being DTS 5.1. Naturally, I chose the DTS feed, having a surround sound system. But it didn’t work; the receiver didn’t give me anything, not even a hum.
Manuals, manuals, mostly poorly translated, give me little solace. I finally managed to get the PCM stream converted via Dolby ProLogic to a faux surround sound, but I knew that wasn’t right, that the receiver could handle DTS. And here’s gripe number 2: why doesn’t this “just work”? Why can’t I just connect these things and have them give me sound? I’m a geek, so I should understand all this stuff, but imagine if it was, well, my mother (that’s a hypothetical; she doesn’t even have a DVD player), who doesn’t understand tech?
After a lot of trial and error, I found the solution: I had to set my DVD player to put out audio in bitstream rather than PCM, but nowhere was this really explained. We complain about computers being complicated, but nothing could be more complex today than home audio systems. I grew up in a time when all people worried about was bass, treble and balance, but now, to watch and listen to a DVD, you almost need a degree in acronymology. I wonder how many people actually get the best sound out of their systems these days? It’s no longer a question of speaker placement, but simply of understanding the myriad options available. My new receiver has about 100 plugs and jacks on the back, and about 8,000 options via its menus and buttons. (And the remote looks like it could have launched the Apollo mission.)
I may sound like I’m turning into a codger, but this over-complication of consumer technology is starting to get to me. Why should one need to understand the different types of (patented) audio compression technologies to be able to watch a DVD? With computers, it is actually easier than this, since most things are set up to be compatible with each other. (I’m not talking about file compatibility, but simply the fact that you can, say, rip a CD without having to worry about setting obscure options.) The number of audio technologies that my receiver handles is astounding; I had never heard of most of them. Is this just a result of different, competing technologies fighting it out for supremacy, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? Or is there some real reason for all this?
I, for one, am perplexed.
