gps10's blog

Home Theater Project

After living for too long without a good stereo, I've resumed my quest to purchase an audio amp/receiver and speakers. This is no small task and will take much time given my discerning ear.

However, one thing is for sure: the components I will buy will have a RS-232 serial port so that I may control them from a computer. Fortunately, most companies publish the protocol free for anyone to use! The protocols are rather trivial and allow you to perform nearly every feature possible with the remote, and sometimes even more!

Of course, hooking components up via RS-232 for control is nothing new. Many custom installations control all the components using the RS-232 port. So, what will make my solution different? Well, since I work for a speech company, I'm going to control it via voice! All I need is a microphone and a speech recognition engine. For the speech, I will utilize the Windows Speech Recognition API and Vista's amazing built-in speech recognizer to create software that listens for speech and outputs commands to the home theater components. "Play artist Beatles," "play album Dark Side of the Moon," "play track Layla." So much potential.

And, it is all enabled by manufacturers willing to keep their communication protocols open. Too often these days we see people build walled gardens around products. I understand wanting to privatize and thus monetize product features, but at least give me SOME control over the device I've purchased, especially if it communicates with 3rd party devices. Generally speaking, if it has a network or serial port, the information that I need to communicate or interface with the device should be freely available. This especially holds true if the device has a "sharing" feature. I don't consider it sharing if I can't write the software to share my own way. In other words, don't be ">DLNA.

Now, I just need to find the components. So many choices... Yamaha, Pioneer, Onkyo, Denon, Integra, Sherwood Newcastle, Rotel, NAD, B&K, etc. And that is just the receivers/amps I am looking at. Speakers, well, the list of brands is at least twice as long. What's worse is, the speaker selection will drive the amp requirements. You have to worry about matching an overly bright receiver with top-heavy speakers, etc. You also have to worry about load requirements on some speakers. Many high-end speakers operate closer to 4 ohms and are thus harder to drive. If you didn't know, the power rating on most receivers is given with only driving 2 channels at 8 ohms. You lose power by lowering the ohms and by powering more than two channels. Of course, most speakers sound just fine at normal listening levels with less than 20 watts (do the math), but I digress...

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