Frustration

We're adding a new entertainment center to our living room. The intent is to have a large screen LCD HD TV and a Blue Ray/DVD player/amplifier with Surround Sound. When we were looking for the system, I decided on a Bravia XBR6 52" LCD and the Sony BDV-IS1000 BD/DVD Home Theatre System. I chose this particular home theater system due to the small size of the speakers, their good sound, and the fact that the rear speaker can connect wirelessly to the main unit of the system so that I wouldn't have to run speaker wire underneath the house.

So far this has been a fiasco. The orders were placed and the TV and theater system arrived promptly. But, before we could put everything together, we needed a new entertainment center to support the equipment. We wanted and Sanus three shelf unit like we have in our family room, but the unit we wanted was discontinued. So, we went to the local Best Buy, found a unit we liked in their Magnolia display room, and the sales clerk there told us it was only available online. He pulled it up on the in-store kiosk, selected it for us, and told us we could put in our information to order it. No problem, right? Wrong!

It arrived about a week later, and as I was putting it together it seemed quite different from the one in the store. In fact, it was very different and wasn't even made by the same manufacturer. So back we went to Best Buy to return it. I'll have to admit they took it back with no problem, but the unit we wanted wasn't even available from them. After a futile search online, we finally picked up a Bello center from Video Only. It looks great and fits perfectly in the corner, but it's only two shelves high, which is lower than we wanted, but we figured we could make it work with what we wanted to use in the room. In fact, when the TV was set on the center, we found the height was just fine. However, we noticed the TV had been damaged during shipment.

The right corner of the TV was damaged (the plastic corner had broken off and the speaker grid support had broken off) and this damage was hidden by the styrofoam packing material. So now, that had to be returned. Again, we were quite fortunate in that the company where we purchased the unit was very nice about the return and arranged for the delivery of a new set to coincide with the pickup of the damaged one. That straightened out and the new unit ordered, we turned our efforts to installing the Home Theater System. Since the damage to the TV was only cosmetic, we figured it would be pretty easy to set up the system and have everything prepared for the delivery of the remaining furniture and the replacement TV.

The system was very well packed and the speakers were much smaller than I expected. The wires were all color coded so everything was easy to assemble. The wireless rear amplifier meant I didn't need to crawl under the house and pull wires, and could simply route the speakers wires around the window frames hidden beneath the curtains. That would have been great, except that after two days of going back and forth with Sony tech support, I still couldn't get the rear amplifier unit paired with the main unit. Sony finally gave up after I tried everything they suggested (including turning off everything wireless in the house), and told me to send it back. Once again, the company we ordered it from was very nice about the return and fedex picked it up yesterday.

So, after over a week of work, right now I have a mostly empty living room, a beautiful TV stand and a damaged TV, and no home entertainment system. I'm going to re-order a system on Monday, but I'm going to get a discreet setup (separate receiver and Blue Ray Player) with wired speakers. It's going to cost me about double the other system, but I just don't think wireless technology is quite where it needs to be yet.

Fortunately, I had a great birthday today with two of my grandkids and my two daughters, a relaxing 90 minute massage purchased for me by my loving wife, and a great lunch at one of my favorite restaurants. And tomorrow, I have a shoot with a fun model. Life could be much, much worse.