My Onkyo SR-601 is back from the shop. Apparently it had a faulty connection on the PCB that the tech was able to repair without too much trouble once he tracked it down (damn you, lazy Onkyo refurb engineer!). Perhaps unsurprisingly once this trace was fixed the 12v bus came back to life and everything worked just dandy (the unit is heavily reliant upon 12v, it seems) so it was ready for me to pick up today. I drove down to the repair joint after work, grabbed it up and brought it home. After an hour and a half of measuring out wire, cutting it to length, stripping it, labelling it and hooking it up I took a deep breath and flipped the power strip on.

Hot damn, it works!

I dug around through my collection until I found my Extreme Edition DVD of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The Extreme DVD version of T2 has a THX optimizer routine on it, so I used that to put the channels through their paces. According to the tests everything was wired up properly and working exactly to spec. As soon as I had assured myself that everything was up to snuff I started putting the receiver through its paces, playing CDs on it via the DVD player (Wolfsheim's "Spectators" and Front Line Assembly's "Epitaph") and then dropping in a few DVDs to test the surround sound processing (I used the Superbit version of Johnny Mnemonic for DTS and The Animatrix for Dolby 5.1).

Right now I have the Jurassic Park sound track playing and it is quite, quite lovely. This was money well-spent, and definately worth the wait to get the receiver fixed. I can finally enjoy the home theater experience .. in my home!

I see her stumbling through the rain

Current Mood: giddy
Current Music: John Williams / Jurassic Park OST -- High-Wire Stunts