Home theater appointment

We stopped in at Best Buy today and made an appointment for a Geek Squad member (I keep wanting to say Nerd Herd instead) to visit on Friday to talk about home theater options. Just talking to the "blue shirt" and looking over the options got me feeling a bit more confident about getting a good home theater system at an affordable price and being able to install it myself.

My concern right now is just matching up the various inputs. My components are:

• A DISHNetwork 622 DVR, feeding to my TV on component video and audio
  
• A Playstation 3, feeding to my TV on HDMI
  
• A Toshiba HD-DVD player, feeding to my TV on HDMI via a 3-way HDMI switch
  
• A D-Link DSM-520, feeding to my TV on component video and audio
  
• An old VCR
  
• A composite input sometimes used for older video games, etc.

Some of these devices are capable of digital audio of one format or another, and I haven't really looked into it because right now they're all feeding to my TV, then my TV outputs audio to the cheap, crappy surround-sound system I have. And along the way, whatever bogus information that system used to try to extract the Dolby 5.1 out of a single audio stream is lost, so it doesn't actually get separated at all.

I'm going to need to evaluate what my audio output options are so that I can present them to the Geek Squad to get the most out of the time available.

My hopes are, in order of descending priority:

1. Great audio quality with movies.
   
2. Also good quality for music.
   
3. Being able to turn the TV off while the music is playing and having it still play.
   
4. Not having to fiddle with changing input on two devices every time I change

Looking forward to going ahead with this. It'll be probably a big project to run wires for it (drilling down into the basement is challenging due to the radiant heating), probably a whole weekend. I'm thinking it'll likely happen next month.