Sound Advice

Bang & Olufsen

A peanut-butter sandwich tastes pretty good. You could have one now. But if you wait for your spouse to bring home the groceries, you could have a tastier peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Similarly, if you’re in the market for an audio-video receiver (AVR) for your home theater, or even a home-theater-in-a-box (HTiB)—a system that comprises a receiver, speakers and a video disc player—you face a similar choice.

The current batch of A/V gear gives you more capabilities than ever before––more surround-sound settings than even 2 years ago (when we last reported on this topic), as well as direct iPod/iPhone connectivity. That’s the peanut butter. But by early next year, the next generation of equipment will include the jelly—smoother connectivity among A/V components and between A/V components and the Internet, which will add more to your listening and watching experience.

CHANCE TO ENHANCE. Increasingly, music and video are available to you on the Internet. Almost all Blu-ray Disc players and high-end AVRs now can access Internet music sources, video content, photo sites, and even music and photos that are stored on your personal computer. This means that you easily can view or listen to all of this content on your home-theater system. But your ability to keep up with the technology wave depends on the implementation of the new HDMI standard—1.4a.

HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is the standard that allows all digital audio and video data to move to your HDTV from any compatible device. The standard was upgraded to 1.4 from 1.3 in December. But 1.4 lasted only a few months because the standard didn’t account for broadcast 3-D formats.

The 3-D trend has just started, says Dave Bales of electronics device manufacturer Pioneer. “We can’t know how it will turn out,” he says. “We do know that TV, Blu-ray and gaming manufacturers are tooling up, and broadcasters will be launching 3-D channels.”

But the “a” specifications were added so late that AVR, Blu-ray player and HDTV manufacturers, who already were producing 2010 products, have been able to incorporate the technology of just two of the four HDMI enhancements into models of their products. One of these covers 3-D video. Only HDTVs that have one or more HDMI 1.4a jacks can read the 3-D signal from a cable or satellite set-top box or an HDMI 1.4a-equipped 3-D Blu-ray player.

The other HDMI enhancement is Audio Return Channel (ARC). ARC makes it so the HDMI format now can transmit digital audio from your HDTV as well as to it. This delivers two advantages: First, an HDMI-enabled soundbar requires only HDMI connectors from your cable or satellite box to the soundbar and from the soundbar to your HDTV. If you don’t have a cable or satellite box, you can connect your HDTV to the soundbar. Before, you needed a crisscross of analog and digital cables to connect devices.

Second, if you have an Internet-connected HDTV, ARC allows you to connect and listen to Internet music sources through your soundbar or through your AVR and speakers. Before ARC came along, there was no way to get the sound from your HDTV.

Unfortunately, no current gear supports the other two 1.4a enhancements: HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC) and 2K/4K compatibility. With HEC, you would need to connect only one HDMI 1.4a device to the Internet to have all of your HDMI 1.4a devices be connected. Now, you need to connect each Internet-enabled device separately, which means that you need to buy a $100 Wi-Fi dongle (a small radio transceiver that plugs into a USB jack on your electronic device and connects to your home wireless network) or a splitter, which turns a single Ethernet connection into four or five. By early 2011, you will be able to buy HDMI 1.4a devices that incorporate HEC, and that will eliminate that expense (and the spaghetti tangle of cable that is behind your home-theater setup).