AT least ‘lectronic stuff, anyhow.

Heathen Central’s 3rd stereo receiver — after 1988’s entry-level Pioneer (RIP) and 1992’s $1,000 Onkyo battleship (still in limited service in Heathen HQ’s office) — has gone the way of all circuits. This is somewhat irritating, since it wasn’t cheap and has been in for repairs once already despite its relative youth (b. in late 2000 or early 2001; we forget, but it was soon after our acquisition of the Steel Treehouse Lodge (tm pending)). The 2000-era box — an Arcam AVR100 — was nice enough, and did the New Fanciness of both Dolby Digital and DTS, so we were very happy with it. Except for a few things.

• Problem the First was that, unlike some of the fancier models of its era, renaming inputs wasn’t possible. No receiver anywhere, I’m convinced, actually has the correct equipment plugged into every port, and for lots of good reasons, but having customizable text on the screen means at least some positive feedback is possible for the operator (i.e., when you’ve got the TV plugged into VCR for input-scarcity reasons, it’s nice if the screen says “TV” anyway).

• Problem the Second was an unfortunately made bet w/r/t digital audio bus inputs. Back in the day, everything was on a pair of RCA cables, one left channel and one right, but with multichannel came the need for, well, more than that (Dolby Digital has 6 distinct channels). Digital cabling solved the problem, but there were two main contenders for plug type: Coaxial and optical. The Arcam has two coax but only one optical input, but the market has since settled on optical. Oops. Double oops since Heathen HQ has optical inputs coming from the Tivo, the XBox, and the streaming music from the Airport Express (heretofore routed through an outboard D/A; we only did cable swap between the Tivo and XBox).

• Problem the Third was video switching, meaning the “stereo” controls both what you hear and what you see on the TV. Receivers as old as the Onkyo would try to do this, but they could only handle composite video — i.e., single-RCA plug video feeds that, quite frankly, look like ass even with plain-jane cable TV. In a world of 1080i, that’s just not enough. Even in 2000, the solution wasn’t good enough — the Aardvark will switch S-Video (good enough for standard-resolution DirecTV), but nothing better, so using the DVD player or the XBox meant switching inputs on both the receiver and the TV, which got direct feeds from the higher-resolution sources.

Combine all three of these issues, and you get a situation wherein I once typed up a three-page guide for a long-term houseguest just so she could watch TV when Mrs. Heathen and I were out.

Well, now that the Arcam’s dead, we have a new sheriff in town in a little Yamaha amp, and it gleefully solves all these problems.

• First, inputs are re-nameable onscreen, so when you scroll the Input knob, you see a word that means something for the local setup. Even better, the Yamaha line comes with four big round buttons square in the front of the box called “Scenes;” these amount to input-and-surround-setting macros you can configure for easy access. At the Steel Treehouse Lounge, #1 is the new Tivo; #2 is the old Tivo (shut up); #3 is the DVD player on stereo-only with all DSP and processing bypassed; and #4 is for DVD movies; each of these also gets its own, human-created name, so it’s clear when you hit one of the buttons what the gig is. No muss, no fuss, and certainly no 3-page instruction manuals for visiting playwrights.

• Second, the digital bus problem is solved in spades, again with a bit of a one-two punch. It’s got enough of the right plugs for us, which is great, but you can also reassign the higher-resolution plugs on the back (i.e., the inputs for digital audio (coax & optical), HDMI, and component video) to the input slots arbitrarily to better suit your configuration. It’s part of the same interface you use for changing input names.

• Finally, the video switching problem is dead, dead, dead. Only two remotes live on the coffeetable now: Tivo and receiver. There’s no need to switch TV inputs now, since everything goes through the receiver — and will continue to do so well into the future. (The receiver is actually smarter than the TV now, since the 2001-era TV doesn’t know from HDMI.)

As a bonus? The Yamaha had a lower number on its price tag than either the Onkyo or the Arcam, which means it’s actually MUCH MUCH cheaper if you adjust for inflation — about half the price of the Onkyo in 2007 dollars, and 2/3 that of the Arcam.