I like to think that my first home theater began with my first DVD player. I wanted to go over the history of me and home theater gear. I am going to list my upgrades (or initial purchases) in chronological order with a few comments along the way.
7/7/1997 - It all began with my purchase of the Sony DVP-S7000 which is either the first or second commercially available DVD player. I had this hooked up to a 27" Sony CRT initially with my hodgepodge of speakers and a refurbished Sony receiver. I still have and use this DVD player, which is more than most can say of DVD players made much more recently. This player was released without what are today very standard features such as progressive output and DTS.
10/29/1997 - My first real receiver was the Sony STR-DA80ES. It had the ability to decode Dolby Digital and output the .1 of 5.1 to a dedicated subwoofer. This receiver pre-dated DTS in the home for the most part and did not feature that.
11/22/1998 - My first wide screen TV was a Toshiba TW40F80 which was 40". This was one of Toshiba's first wide screen TV's. It had what Toshiba called ColorStream inputs which were component inputs limited to 480i. However with this TV I could watch DVD's in widescreen using the anamorphic feature and not have black bars at the top and bottom on most movies (2.35:1 still has small bars). This TV survived my move from Illinois back to Virginia in late 1998 and then even a second move in late 2000. It served me well for quite a long time.
12/28/1999 - I got DirecTV and have had it pretty much ever since. There was a gap when I moved to my current house until I got installed and just had OTA.
12/5/2000 - I got my first TiVo DVR the SAT-T60, which as far as I know is still working at Roger's house. While not directly home theater related it was a major step forward in home entertainment. The ability to record TV (even 2 channels at once) at full original quality and play it back whenever you want. It has since been upgraded at least once if not twice with larger hard drives and had numerous software releases.
3/16/2001 - I bought my first HDTV and HDTV/DirecTV receiver at this point. The TV was a Toshiba 65H80 and the receiver was a Toshiba DST-3000. The TV was a 65" monster, it was almost 3' deep and about 5' wide and 5' tall. A picture of it shortly after I got it is here. At the time when I got the HDTV receiver there was nothing on DirecTV in HDTV I was only able to get broadcasts off an antenna. It worked well most of the time with a small antenna but did need adjustments some times. The first thing I watched in HDTV was the Final Four that year, which Illinois was supposed to be in, but instead it was Maryland so I had a bunch of people over to watch them play instead. I kept both of these devices for quite a while. The TV had ColorStream Pro inputs that accepted both 480p and 1080i, the TV couldn't handle 720p so the tuner converted everything to 1080i. This TV also natively supported 480p instead of converting it to 540p to match the refresh of 1080i, which I think enabled a better DVD picture. At this point I had access to 1-4 HD channels at a given time and only during primetime.
3/22/2001 - I got my second DVD player the Toshiba SD-6200 to go along with the new TV. This was useful so I could have 480p out to my 65" wide screen. Some might say what is the big deal about DVD players, well at this point they were still adding big features to players and they weren't being given away for $15-30.
12/31/2001 - At this point I decided to upgrade my receiver and DVD player again. I got my third DVD player the Toshiba SD-4700 which also had 480p output, DTS as well as DVD-Audio. The receiver I got was an Onkyo TX-DS797. This receiver had the ability to component switching and it could decode both DD EX 6.1 and DTS ES 6.1. Over its first 2 years this receiver had several issues due to bad DSP's. However once it was finally fixed it has worked flawlessly. A picture of the setup around this time is here.
3/16/2002 - I finally got a matched set of speakers. Over the years I had been getting various bits and pieces of a 5.1 system. I wanted to a complete one so I went with a set Paradigm System 7 which included a 6 individual speakers and a very nice sub woofer. All the speakers were so big that I needed Jerry to come help me get them home. I didn't even really get them setup properly distance wise until I got to my current theater.
4/28/2004 - My next addition to my HT lifestyle was a HD DVR in the form of the DirecTV TiVo HR10-250. This was one of the first and still arguably one of the best HD DVR's on the market. It is still humming away in the theater proper with its twice upgraded 1.5 TB of storage. It may be retired sometime in the next 12 months due to lack of MPEG-4 support, I am hoping a new TiVo based DirecTV DVR will become available by then. By this time DirecTV had added some HD channels and I had access to about 10 channels, some even 24 hour a day HD.
9/6/2005 - While working on the main theater I decided I needed a HDTV to tide me over. Also it was a birthday present for myself. I got a 27" 720p Westinghouse LCD Monitor. It was attached to HR10-250 once I got DirecTV at the new house.
11/22/2005 - On launch day I got my pre-order of an Xbox 360. I include it here since it was the first HD game console and I also used to use it as my first HD-DVD player.
Late Jan 2006 - I actually ordered these components in mid-December in anticipation of the completion of my basement but they didn't get installed until the theater was essentially complete. I got an Oppo DV-971H to do DVD upconverting to feed the 720p projector I got. The 720p projector mentioned earlier that I got was a Sanyo PLV-Z4. These two components along with the ones above have been powering my home theater for almost two years at this point.
10/20/2007 - I finally broke down and got one of DirecTV's non-TiVo HD DVR+ boxes. With the new dish and the new DVR I now have access to 70+ HDTV channels. It only took 6 years but HD is almost fully here for me.
11/4/2007 - My first upgrade to the current home theater will be the Onkyo TX-SR705. Once I get it I will do another post talking about it in more detail.
11/7/2007 - My second upgrade is a Sanyo PLV-Z2000 1080p projector.
12/17/2007 - My third and final upgrade is a Samsung BD-UP5000.
5/30/2007 - I finally get to hear my first Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA soundtracks in my home theater thanks to the long awaited firmware update to the BD-UP5000.
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