Home theater ramblings. (Components).

I have been requesting audio/video receivers since I noticed the newest models touted at the CES. I admit that checking the shipping weights of some of these new models gave me serious pause for thought. Unfortunately, most electronic firms do not ship these behemoths with burly installers and erudite technicians who can demonstrate everything that these super boxes can do.

Would that kind of concern and consideration influence my dispassionate reviews? Do not worry about my being compromised: nobody has volunteered such service and has responded to my requests with silence or sarcasm. Would it shock you to learn that many of them have not responded at all?

I must confess that it has been so long since I got new product (I prefer 2 or three boxes per week) that the dogs didn't even twitch when the Onkyo TX-SR700 AV receiver arrived. I found that I could lift the box and carry it into the house with no threat to the box or myself. I had to restrain myself and wait for help in preparing my test site for receiving the unit. I assembled my team and to my great delight remembered something about an ancient Greek who said that with a pivot and a long enough lever he could move the earth. While waiting for the crew, I dug up the handle to an air guitar and proceeded without breaking anything under or around the box or myself to lift three corners and insert slides under them. One corner was too crowded to permit me to fit in (rather like coach seats on airlines) so I waited for a hapless volunteer who took care of the last slide.

In next to no time, I had sundry devices hooked up and was provided with sound and pictures. It was simple to start enjoying this black box but a casual look at the owner's manual made me realize that audio/video receivers had changed in the past few years. I began to feel old and foolish. It took me a good three days to sort out the speaker placement and the connections. I even figured out how to make the remote control respond to my commands and what started out as a hardware review became a revelation.

My ears are a little better than my joints and my eyes are manifestly analog even as I explore digital technology. I'd begun to assume that decent sound and acceptable images were easy to come by. I began to think that I'd just as soon revert to an amplifier, a turntable, and speaker. As my range of motion, my hearing, my eyesight, and my flexibility have become more diminished while the technology has changed with great rapidity.

From my first exposure to television in 1939, I saw it as a wonderful technology. I still hold it possible even after having adjusted a large-screen television on an afternoon fraught with the toothy smile of game show hosts. I still have the incidental nightmare. I discovered that multiple speakers and processed sound could enhance music and speech. (I fondly recall an engineer who went to hear the CSO with me live and sat through the concert adjusting phantom pots to tailor the sound to his tastes.)

I heard a wide range of soloists and ensembles playing music and a bevy of actors dazzling me with their command of spoken words and their power. When a very kind landlady ...