Jim's Home Theater Weblog

My remotes were a mess. There were 4 of them on my coffee table, and all could be used at any moment during a typical weekend. This had to end, and end qucikly.

I heard nothing but good things about Harmony remotes on the AVS Forum, and decided to give it a shot. So over the weekend I purchased a Harmony H659, and it lived up to its advance billing, and then some. I love it. I can put all the oem remotes to the side and use one to quickly and easily control every aspect of all my components. It is a dream come true.

After doing some listening, I decided that my subwoofer was terrible -- not that I wasn't aware of this already. But before starting the upgrade process, I thought I'd try putting it in the back corner of the room, instead of in the front next to the kitchen (where all the bass seemed to go).

To do so, I needed to do a pretty long subwoofer cable run, so went out and bought a cheapo 25' Acoustic Research subwoofer cable for $10 from SoundCity. I got it home and hooked it up, hid the cable very slopily and lazily, and powered up. Sounded much better, the bass actually complemented the rest of the system for once. It wasn't a cure-all, as some scenes from Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones became really distorted during my tests, but overall it made things much more enjoyable.

It also made me reconsider what next to spend my time researching and money on: new surround speakers. I'm thinking of the Axiom QS4s, but I'm only in the beginning stages of looking into this.

Next on the list are the front stage speakers and the subwoofer. Then it's back to looking at components, such as the DVD player and receiver. Boy, this is fun :).