I’m doing a little plotting on what to do with my current home stereo setup. It’s been nice enough, but my A/V receiver is almost five years old—I know because I bought it as a belated birthday present for myself right after I turned 21, needing to leave the house as Al Leiter carved up my beloved Reds in the one-game NL Wild Card playoff in 1999 [hey, it was painful, and I remember pain, crapface]—and it wasn’t top-of-the-line or even industry-standard back in the day.

Because I’ve been thinking about this for a month but haven’t had the coherence to write about it anywhere else, I’m going to put my specifications for a unit up in this entry, which is written primarily for my convenience. Any ancillary enjoyment you get out of it is the whipped cream on top of the sundae. That said, let’s move forward:

Current components I will retain:

• My 25″ Sony Vega TV. It kicks ass, and there’s no need to replace it. It has S-Video, component, and coaxial cable inputs. I’d prefer to use the S-Video—in fact, the desire to have S-Video switching is a prime driver in the upgrade.
• My Sony PlayStation2. It’s my only gaming platform right now, and it will remain that way for the forseeable future [read: 3-6 months]. It presently serves as my sole DVD player in the living room, and that’s an okay solution for right now. It’s directly hooked up to the TV, though, and I’d rather route the signal through the A/V receiver and do the switching there. Dammit, those receivers are there to route signals, and the incompetence of my receiver is another driver here.
• My 40-hour Series2 TiVo. Yes, I know, only 40 hours. Shush.
• My 5-disc Aiwa CD changer. It does the job for right now. I’d dearly love a monster changer that took 300 discs or some obscene value like that, but that’s a luxury. The changer is as old as the receiver, and it’s still in fine shape. Heck, it has an optical out that the receiver never could use.
• My current 12″ floor speakers. They’re cheap, but I’m in an apartment, not a house.

Components that I’m planning on acquiring:

• The as-yet-spec’d receiver.
• A DVD recorder. I’d prefer to dump archive recordings of stuff I’ve gotten via broadcast to DVD rather than VHS. As such, a DVD recorder is just about a requirement. It would be a bonus if it recorded CD-Rs, because then I could stop using my computer as a burner.
• Update: I don’t know why I didn’t think of this: XM SkyFi home adapter. I will find a spot to mount an antenna on the outside of the apartment building come hell or high water.

Components that I might acquire:

• An XBox. As if I need one or anything.
• A large capacity CD changer. I’m probably looking at something on the order of 300+ disc capacity. I’d want something that I could put my entire collection into and leave it in place. Of course, right now I have no earthly idea how many CDs I own, so that question must be answered first.
• A large capacity DVD changer. Now that I have a Netflix subscription, I buy far fewer DVDs. That said, I’d make use of a unit where I could put all my discs in at once and leave it be.
• An amplifier setup. It’d probably be better not to use an on-board amp that’s in a receiver. That seems a bit goofy to let one unit do all the work.

As I see it, I need S-Video capability, digital ins, etc. In terms of I/O:

Inputs: three present, four planned. A unit with seven input paths would be sufficient.

Outputs: one video present, one audio planned. A unit with three output paths would be more than sufficient.

I want something that’s at least 6.1 capable.

That’s about all the dealbreakers I can imagine myself having. Now, to get into looking for something …