I’ve finally got my home cinema set up. Here’s the line-up:

• Samsung 40″ 1080p LCD TV. Very nice screen. Has a PC input as well as two HDMI ports.
• Hush Media Centre PC. It runs Windows Vista Ultimate. It came with an HD sound card and a Hauppauge twin-input video capture card and a graphics card with an HDMI output (although I use the VGA port instead because my TV had one). It’s designed to be ultra-quiet thanks to aluminium cooling fins. I had a lot of problems with drivers and the TV signal but a new signal booster and lots of downloads later, the whole thing works like a dream. With 500GB of hard disk space, it can record something like 400 hours of TV and the video card does a great job of upscaling to 1080p. I bought Microsoft infrared Media Center keyboard for £20 from Novatech. (Don’t pay more than this - Amazon and others were charging close to £100. Also be aware that the mouse pointer on this gadget is terrible - just about usable for the odd login only.)
• Sky HD satellite decoder. Great sound quality and picture quality from HD channels. I just wish it had a bigger hard disk so I could keep more stuff. The 160GB capacity is enough for three or four HD films only. My only gripe here is that Sky’s HD website obfuscates the fact that you have to pay extra to get HD movies. It sort of implies that the £10 a month HD subscription also includes the two HD movie channels. It doesn’t.
• Arcam DV137 DVD player. Awesome DVD player. It upscales to 1080p. With new DVDs, the picture quality is the same as ‘true’ HD off the PC or Sky box. Lord of the Rings is particularly good.
• Arcam AR350 Receiver. Nearly a 1000 watts of neighbour-aggravating sound. The PC, Sky and DVD player all hook up via optical audio cables. The Sky and DVD use the HDMI for video. I haven’t turned this up beyond about 50% of its full capacity. I wish I lived in the country so I could dial it up to 11. It rocks.
• B&W PV1 Subwoofer and B&W satellite speakers. The subwoofer is particularly cool, as a piece of sculpture and as a chest-thumping speaker. I hadn’t realised how important sound quality was to watching films until I got this setup. Sky HD programs and the DVD push out 5.1 surround sound and the experience is very different from watching regular TV.
  

However the key to the whole thing is to get a programmable remote control. This replaces (in my case) five separate remotes and makes it much easier to use the whole stack.

• Logitech Harmony 1000 programmable remote. I bought this from Amazon after extensive research. It’s easy to set up using a PC and the internet. It’s made of shiny aluminium and has a touch screen. With a bit of fiddling (well a day, actually) I got it set up to control everything beautifully. I think I could probably set it up again from scratch in about fifteen minutes, knowing what I know now. Certainly, adding the two Arcam boxes took ten minutes.
  

Lastly, I also got a couple of cheap reclining armchairs from Furniture Village and a huge curry from TiffinBox. A good sit down and a curry are essential parts of the home cinema experience.

Here are some tips from my experience:

• Read the manual before you start playing around with programmable remote controls.
• Make sure your PC is certified Vista compatible before you buy it. I had to flash the BIOS, reinstall Windows twice and download new drivers for motherboard, graphics, sound and video capture card. (Mind you Hush technical support was first-rate, the machine is beautiful, silent and works fine now and Evesham couldn’t even deliver one when I order a media centre PC from them.)
• Don’t let Hi-fi shops flog you expensive cables. They wanted to charge me £50 each for three fibre optic cables. I bought cables from Amazon for £8 each. It’s digital. Cable quality doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t matter worth £150. Similarly, I was sold a pup on speaker cables, HDMI cables etc. You can easily waste £500 on cables for a set up like this if you let the ‘experts’ baffle brains with bullshit (”Do you want woofers and tweeters with that” comes to mind.)
• Choose your supplier carefully. Martin Kleiser charged me a lot of money for ‘project management’ and provided virtually none. They also tried to nickel and dime me on cables (e.g. £75 for a roll of Cat 5 cable when I only need 20 or 30 meters). They were particularly keen on flogging me gold-plated cables. They installed my Sonos system (well actually, they screwed in the speakers and I set up the software) and ‘helped’ with the cabling for the home cinema but I got so fed up with their nonsense that I bought all the kit and the final installation from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi in Ealing who were much more helpful and less haughty. They also gave me 30% off the TV, 25% off the speakers and 15% off the receiver and DVD player. This is a significant saving.
• Plan your cable runs and test your cables. If you are embedding cables in the wall, you need to coordinate between your builder and your hi-fi installers. Get the cables tested before you re-plaster. Ideally, bury cable trunking rather than cables so you can run new cables through if necessary. Make sure you embed all the cables you’re going to need. Because of Martin Kleiser’s negligence (see above), I have one duff cable which means a surface mounted replacement plus only one of the three cables that run out of the TV are embedded in the wall. It actually looks okay (because of the layout of the room, doors and things) but it could have ended up looking terrible.
• Test the digital TV signal first. I had a strong digital TV signal but an electrical problem with the distributor / amplifier was causing it to drop out every few minutes. Getting an aerial company out and testing it properly helped diagnose the problem. I replaced the signal amplifier for about £80 and it works perfectly now. However, I spent a day trying a lot of other things to figure out why the signal was hiccuping first.
• Get professional installation help. I’m a certified geek and I love playing with all this stuff but I think the guys from Sevenoaks really knew their stuff and got the stack set up in four or five hours whereas it would have taken me a couple of days. I’m geeky but not that handy with powertools so I needed help from my builder and installers to mount the speakers and TV bracket.
• 1080p matters. Several people told me not to bother with 1080p. However, the small marginal cost of getting a TV that can do it means that I can get the best possible signal out of all my other devices and, especially, my PC which runs in full 1920 by 1080 pixels - great for photo slideshows and presentations.
• Did I mention the curry?

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