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Loyal readers may recall the saga involving my Koss home theater system. So I finally got tired of dealing with the finicky stereo unit and ordered a new Denon receiver. But as luck would have it, the launch date got pushed back by a few months (it was supposed to be available as of August 2007). But the wait is now over, my long-anticipated Denon AVR-2808 came in yesterday. Woot!

I of course spent a good chunk of the late evening and early morning setting it up and plugging stuff into it, which involved a fair amount of crawling behind the TV and the use of my super handy LED flashlight. Fortunately I had a few spare HDMI and optical cables ready to go, purchased from MonoPrice.com a few months ago in preparation for this glorious day. Thanks to the 2808's HDMI switching and scaling functions I was able to reduce the number of cables running around behind the TV. Now my cable box and my Playstations (2 and 3) can go to the receiver and from there one HDMI cable to the TV.

So the old Koss HTiB is out and the Denon is in, but the old Koss speakers are still in place. These are some pretty small 4 ohm speakers and I'm now convinced they're not going to cut it. In fact my very first impression after I powered up the system is that I need better speakers. I found that I had to crank the master volume pretty far up in order to get any decent sound from the speakers. The system is really designed for 6-8 ohm speakers. But the worst part is, the unpowered subwoofer that I have from the Koss system is not compatible with the 2808. It's set up for a self-powered subwoofer, so it only has a pre-amp output. So for the moment I have very little bass response, and my next upgrade is probably going to be a new powered subwoofer. But maybe a whole new set of speakers soon after that. Oh yeah, just what I needed, another expensive hobby. Stay tuned as I continue to pimp my home theater.