In many technological avenues, I am an “early adopter,” racing off to get the latest gadget because I can see all of the interesting possibilities, even though it may not really work very well (yet). But when it comes to my “home theater,” I am still living in the caveman days. Though we upgraded the sound a couple of years ago to 5.1 with some pretty nice speakers and receiver, the “display” is still a plain old 27″ CRT television and all of the music is on CDs. Our TiVo is the original Hughes model with “only” 35 hours of capacity.
My son even asked me recently why we do not have a big screen TV. I explained that it is because the added expense of the large screen (and replacing the entertainment center with something that could hold it) seems out of proportion to the number of movies that we watch.
Perhaps it is time to move forward in time, from caveman to Ludite. Hardware.Info’s article, ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players concludes
We can be very clear in our conclusions; there is no need to invest $ 2000 or more in a high-end DVD player. A PC with a recent graphics card will produce a much better result for a lot less money. When looking at the final scores of the HQV test, both ATI and nVidia graphics cards perform a lot better than any DVD player we have tested. We would go as far as to say to get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!
I have to admit that it would be nice to have all of my music instantly available on a WiFi networked, media-center computer. Maybe it is time to finish replacing the last of my vinyl disks with digital versions (or ripping the ones which cannot be repurchased). And maybe it is finally time to let go of not only the turntable but the cassette deck as well.
