So after an unexpectedly long journey to Costco and Best Buy (and major props to Margie and Katherine, especially with Margie giving advice in the face of my dithering, and the both of them spending some hours when they could have been taking well-needed naps), I’ve finally found (and installed) a replacement for the old RCA receiver.
I ended up going with a separate receiver and DVD player option. I just couldn’t find an all-in-one home theater that did everything I wanted as the center of the entertainment center. Instead, I went with a Yamaha RX-V461BL receiver (official page).
It took a little bit to set it up — of course. The cabling was pretty much of a match — except that the subwoofer in the new unit uses an RCA jack vs being bare wires (may need a new subwoofer — 14″ tall). The new receiver is much taller, so there was no room for a DVD. We realized the possibility (though we hadn’t measured the clearance, silly me), so rather than getting a full-blown 5-disc DVD player, we got a cheapy-tiny RCA upscaling DVD player that’s teeny-tiny enough, and is stacked down with the VCR in the cabinet. We also need to get the DVR/Cable remote to work properly with the Yamaha (for volume, at least).
It’s not ideal — yet — but it should be overall an improvement. Especially if it means that DVDs don’t crap out in the middle the way they have been (which was the driver for all of this in the first place).
There are some other possibilities that this new receiver opens up … but that’s something for another day.
The one thing this unit doesn’t have is HDMI — which is sort of an all-in-one-cable audio/visual connection system that’s supposedly the bee’s knees for home theater systems.
The problem is that (a) our TV doesn’t have HDMI, and (b) whenever I read up on individual units that have it, there are always complaints about funky, limited, misleading, or just poor implementations of HDMI, from which I gather that this is not yet a mature technology.
One cool side note here — I was able to check out the Amazon pages for various products while at the store via my Blackberry, which prevented some otherwise-necessary back-and-forth to the house on a very busy shopping day of the year.