What Got you into Home Theater? (1 Viewer)

What got you into Home Theater? This ALMOST desbribes my experience as well. Around 1995 or so, somehow and for the 'cool' factor, I bought a Ghostbuster 1 laserdisc. I didn't even have a player, but odly enough the school we went to did. So, I put it in the High School LD player in the AV room, told someone to please not interupt it for two hours and I copied it to tape.

Ghostbusters was my favorite movie at the time. I knew every pan and scan scene from heart. It couldn't be TOO different, right?

Well, I got home. Unfortunatly, a fellow student had to stop it halfway through for a school project, so I on'y got half the movie. But what I did see really did make an impression. But, after looking for more widescreen movies and not having much success, I couldn't do much.

Finally, the Special Editions arrived. I had NEVER scene the movies in the theater before, as I was only born in 78. We had grown up watching them on an early VCR in the mid 80's, with the CBS pan and scan broadcasts. Still remember where most of the commercial breaks where too. So when I went in to see the SE's, I CLEARLY noticed a difference.

So, I went out a month or two afterward. After saving up, I purchased a Creative DX2 X2 Speed DVD Player at around $350's. I think you had to buy a card with it to get it to work as well. Can't remember what the first DVD movie I saw was, but after that I never went to Pan and Scan again.

Bought my fist widescreen monitor about two years ago for the PC when they became cheap enough. Then I u pgraded to a Creative, Non THX System for about 200$'s. The house was shaking, the picture was great, and I was happy .

Now, we have a Panasonic TH42PX50 an Onkyo Home THeater system, and a DVD player sitting down stairs wich I paid half for..... upstairs we have a Creative THX system, and a Creative THX card, and couldn't be happier ..

Same thing that got me into the HTF, I bought a DVD player, a Panasonic A-120U that my parents now have. I figured I might as well find out what good DVD player is out there and then I thought I'd like to get a surround system and all that.

Jay

My general interest in audio got me into home theater. My dad ever since I can remember had a nice stereo rig. I believe he started with a Denon integrated amplifier, an Onkyo cd-player, and a pair of AAL(higher end MTX at the time) 3-way bookshelfs. He used to try to scare me with the loud stereo and being so young made it seem to be very loud and scary.

Now he has a very respectable stereo but has not made the move to home theater. I started out with the Denon integrated that my dad previously owned and worked my my way up from there. Since then I have had an RCA reciever, Sherwood receiver, JVC receiver, Yamaha receiver, and 2 Onkyo receivers. I moved on to seperates recently using a Rotel processor and a Carver 5 channel amp. I didn't really get into home theater untill DVD came out. I have only had 2 dvd players not counting a playstation 2, a Pioneer and a Toshiba. The Toshiba I still own as you can see in my sig. It is a tank and it is old (1999) and runs like a top, exempt layer transition, but who cares.

I am still young, only 20, and I am pretty sure I am one of those guys who's home theater will always be worth more than his automobile.

Seth=L

RE the thread title--I'm a movie buff.

Because I like to watch grown men fight.



(movies)

My stepfather didn. He was very much into movies, audio, video games and all the different equipment and all that. He had a VCR, laserdic player, CD player, and a bunch of video game systems all hooked up to a big screen TV and a sound system in the living room. Every Friday and Saturday night my family and family friends would all gather in the living room with a bunch of big bowls of popcorn and watch a couple movies each night. On Sunday night we'd all watch the Simpsons and Married With Children.

I'd have to say it was running my Super 8 sound copy of Star Wars covering an entire wall, and blasting the audio through a car speaker I had rigged up to the projector. (Early 80s, when living in a barracks in California...)

I got into DVD/movies when my parents upgraded from VHS to DVD. They bought the best equipment available at the time, and I spent many, many, many hours in front of the tube spinning disks daily. Started my collection of those I liked during the years gone by, and the titles I heard were real good. Now I spend most my spending money on dvd. It's my life, and fave hobby.

Scott

I got into Home Theater before it was a word. I bought my 1st VCR (Panasonic) in 1982, and a Pioneer LD player in 1983. I owned very few video tapes, mostly of Star Trek episodes. I had to have movies on LD, and i recall that i hooked up the LD player to my Panasonic stereo! This was all kind of expensive for a 20 year old boy, but once you OWN a movie you cant go back.

I remember well watching my LDs on my 19" Curtis Mathis TV. That TV died last year by the way, it had been long retied to a guest bedroom.
My next TV was a 27" NEC that came with a console type stereo speaker system, also had a matching NEC 6 head VCR, all bought in the late 80s. My second LD player was the Pioneer 704 bought in the mid nineties, and i still own it. I got into DVD mid 97, and never looked back at my LDs. I had not bought a video tape for over 15 years. LD was the way to go. I was watching widescreen movies on LD before some of you guys were born. Anyway my first DVD player i owned only a year before i gave it away and bought the Sony 7700, still a great DVD player. The NEC TV was retied in 2003, and it was replaced by the Sony XBR that i hope will be my workhorse TV for many years to come. I have a Pioneer receiver and Paradigm speaker system including inwall surround.

Didnt mean to ramble on about what i owned and now own, but all it takes is one thing. First an LD player, then a DVD player. Before you know it your caught up in the experience of owning movies that at one time you could only see a few times on TV, and maybe once every 10 or 15 years in a theater.

Laying aside my teasing, it was a subwoofer which drew me into AV.

My husband had set up a minor multiple-speaker system to our display, during the era of VHS, and before advent of HTIAB was a gleam in a corporate eye.

He lacked a sub, mentioned several times he needed to add one. So one Christmas I started to shop that item, one thing led to another........

Funny, during that research and rebuild, I bought that tiny box sub (first purchase of mine), but by the end of the ‘first year’ I fried the thing. Quickly outclassed by subseqent purchase's I was forced to replace my first toe dip into AV.

In 1995 I had a job working at a movie theater. In an attempt to recreate theater sound I bought an RCA home theater in a box that came with five speakers and a powered sub. In 1996 I got a job working in the home audio department at Circuit City. It was there that I learned about different kinds of sound technologies like stereo, pro logic, Dolby Digital, DTS, THX, etc. That job was a major drain on my finances because thanks to the generous employee discount I was spending more than I was making.

My wife wanted me to fix up the basement and put in a small TV room for the kids. When researching the TV, I came across HTF! I think the 109" screen with the surround sound, 2 subs, and 8 recliners was a little more than she expected, but she is not complaining at all. Now the kids still have the TV upstairs and we are in the basement theater. Thanks HTF!

Dave

It was a combination of two films: The Phantom Menace and The Fellowship of the Ring, which I saw seven times apiece in the theater.

They were such grandiose spectacles that I just knew home video wouldn't do them justice. That's when I started researching projectors, and later hi-def video.

I think (like most) mine wasn't an overnight thing. It started as an affection for audio and decent stereo speakers, etc. - The CD player was the start of things ... Once I got a 4 head VCR and was amazed at how well the 'pause' was. I then started upgrading TV's and figuring out how to hook my VCR into my stereo system, etc.

From there, I just 'got into it'. I have to say that the Star Wars 1997 SE release (on VHS) was what REALLY got the ball rolling for me. Then DVD hit and the rest is history.

..then chapter skip on DVD? (ohs awes) Do we ever pause and give the providers of our HT enough credit for what they have provided, we do love?

Maybe we should stop and intersperse that between comments on the budding areas which can drive adopters crazy, (HD.)

It was the advent of the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to DVD that made me purchase an HDTV. I didn't know at that time that what I would see was not going to be the best this movie would look (that it would be an improvement over regular DVD but not HDTV just because I had an HDTV set.) We also purchased our surround sound system at that point, too. What may push me to purchase an HD-DVD player will be the release of this title in HD, although my set is component only. That and the fact that I have a $50 Best Buy gift certificate, burning a hole in my pocket!
I will buy a new HDMI display in about 2-3 years.

I bought my ex-girlfriend a Yamaha HTIB back in 2000 for $800. I was hooked right away...her I'm not too sure of.

Way back in the early '80s (I was less than 10), my family was friends with a local dentist, who was well off. We went to his house for dinner once, where I saw not only a CD Player, but a home theater. Laserdisc, CRT projector, the works. It made a big impression on me, but I mostly forgot about it until the InFocus X1 projector came out, and it was clear that a real Front-Projection HT could be had by someone of relativly modest means. 2 years later, it was done.

I bought the David Bowie Sound+Vision boxed set in 1989 or 1990, which came with a CD-V disc (a CD that had 20 minutes of audio plus five minutes of LaserDisc video) featuring the video for Ashes To Ashes.

I went to a LaserDisc specialty store to ask if they'd let me spin the disc on one of their demo systems so I could watch the video, which I'd never seen. They said sure, but suggested I wait ten minutes while a salesperson finished trying to sell something to another customer in the super-duper flagship theatre room.

While I was waiting, I browsed their rental discs and noticed that virtually all of them were letterboxed. My eyes got really, really big.

And then they took me into the scary demo room, ran my Bowie CD-V and then showed me some other concerts on LD. The sound blew my mind.

Three months later, I had a LaserDisc player and the start of a really nutty habit.

So there you have it: you can blame David Bowie.

DVD really did it for me, because it was such an improvement over VHS, a format for which I only owned about 5 titles (and 3 of those were Star Wars). I got into DVD by sheer luck really when I got my first desktop computer in 1998, and it had a DVD-ROM drive, which was just an afterthought for me. That is, until I saw how cheap you could pick up some DVD's. I picked up Halloween 2 for about 10 bucks at Wal-Mart of all places (which I find surprising now considering this was still the "early days" of DVD), and was blown away by the picture quality. I knew then that I had to have a standalone player, which my family got soon after for Christmas.

True "home theater" didn't come into the picture until a few years later, and to be honest, I don't know what sparked the interest. I probably just got to looking around the internet at sites like HTF here, and so it began. My first system was a very modest Aiwa CD system that had Dolby Digital decoding capabilities and a 5 speaker + sub package. I do remember the first thing I ever watched with surround sound: American Outlaws (which wasn't my idea, but it was actually good material sound-wise). Since then, I've upgraded receivers and televisions twice, and I don't see this addiction slowing down anytime soon.