The stack:
Turntable:
Speaker:
CD and VHS cabinet (not big enough):
Surviving vinyl (I had a couple of boxes in a closet I forgot to save when Hurricane Opal invited St. Andrew Bay into my apartment):
Receiver: Kenwood VR407, 100/ch 5.1, pretty good 100/ch stereo specs, 2 coax and 2 optical digital inputs, but those are fixed to their sources, i.e. Vid2 is coax, Vid3 is optical, can't move them around and really wish I could. Important thing about it was that it was cheap, and I bought it for the 5.1 when I bought my first DVD player about 7 years ago.
TV: Hitachi 43" 4:3 rear-projector HD, 3 composite/S-video inputs, 2 component inputs, A/V monitor out, audio out, two antenna inputs, dual-tuner PIP. Got it as floor demo for <$500. Letterboxes to 16:9 automatically for 1080i. Requires external HD sources, no HD tuner built in.
DVD: Toshiba, don't have the model# handy, single-disc, has HDMI output with upconversion to 720p or 1080i, but my TV doesn't have HDMI in. One thing I absolutely HATE about this player is when you are fast-scanning and press play, the point it resumes is nowhere near what you were looking at during the scan. My previous player died and I HAD to have optical digital (see receiver description above) and this was the only one I found with it for less than 100 bucks at the time. On the plus side, it plays MPEG-2 and Dvix files directly off a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, so my Top Gear downloads don't have to be re-encoded before burning.
A whole series fits on one DVD-ROM.
Laserdisc: Pioneer CLD-D503, ancient player I got on closeout at Sam's Club a hundred years ago or so. Plays both sides, but did not come with AC-3 built in. Added AC-3 with a kit off the Internet, and found an external Nakamichi decoder on eBay.
CD: Even more ancient JVC XL-M407, 6-disc cartridge plus conventional single tray. Indestructible.
VCR: JVC HR-S4500U, S-VHS. Also ancient, also indestructible. Almost never used now. (See PC tuner card below.) Bought it to replace a JVC S-VHS that I believe was the first consumer S-VHS unit offered in the US.
Turntable: Speaking of ancient, a TD 150 MkII AB belt-drive manual turntable, no automatic tone-arm movement. Got it for 25 bucks from a guy who thought the tone arm was broken, when all he'd done was remove the anti-skating weight. He gave me the weight, said he didn't know what it was for. I did not enlighten him.
Speakers: And incredibly ancient, yet still the best-sounding speakers of the class that I have ever heard, a pair of JBL L-100s, a.k.a. 4311 studio monitor. Cool foam grilles are long gone, replaced with plain acoustic cloth, but all drivers and circuits are still cranking strong. If you've seen the Maxell poster of the "blown-away" guy, this is the speaker in that poster.
These speakers date back to the late '70s, and I got the pair used for $200 in 1988 from a guy who was getting a Technics all-in-one unit as an "upgrade" so he could play CDs.
Rear speakers: A pair of Sonys that came free with the Receiver during a promotion at Circuit City. I don't use a center speaker, as my sofa is directly in front of the TV so centering the location is not necessary. Receiver is in phantom-center mode.
Subwoofer: A JBL 100-watt powered subwoofer that I got cheap when a store called McDuff's closed its doors, 10 or 12 years ago. Got my entertainment center and cabinets, and an 8mm camcorder there too.
TV tuner card in PC: WinTV PVR-250, with hardware MPEG encoding. Driven by Snapstream Beyond TV software to make my PC into a TIVO-like appliance. I have web access to the scheduler, and can stream programs from my PC to wherever I am. I also have a Hauppage Media-MVP at the TV, which plays the recorded files via Ethernet from the computer to S-Video in the TV. Before I got the MediaMPV I would burn recorded shows to a DVD RW disc for TV viewing. The Media MVP allows me to view the recorded program while it's still recording, without having to wait till the end and burn a disc. If I had a slot, I could add another tuner card and the Snapstream software would support recording from multiple tuners simultaneously.
As you can tell, I'm not one to go for the latest and greatest newest toy every year or two, just so I can say I have the latest and greatest (although the tuner-card/MediaMVP setup is pretty cool) and I have a sometimes fair talent for acquisition. What I have works, has plenty of power for the room, and while I would like some features like selecting the source for the digital inputs, until this unit makes smoke instead of sound, it's staying where it is.
