For those who follow my misadventures over on my personal blog, you may be familiar with the fact that I recently finished construction on my basement.  While it’s nice having a third bathroom, fourth bedroom, and laundry room, the best part about it is the family room.  I wired the room to accommodate a 7.1 home theater.  I even built a shelf over my fireplace that will be home to a 52″ LCD television.  The whole setup is very sweet and I take great pride in knowing that it was my hands that built it all.

Despite construction having been mostly completed for weeks, it has only been within the past few days that I’ve had the time to begin moving my electronics into place.  Unfortunately, I haven’t upgraded my components yet so I’m using a 12-year-old Pioneer four-channel receiver with a seven-year-old 27″ television.

In addition to the speaker and sub-woofer lines, I also ran coax for cable television and HDMI and component cables for the new HD television and receiver that I’m hoping will be mine next spring.  We’re all familiar with the old adage concerning fitting a square peg into a round hole; that’s basically what I’m trying to do here.  The problem is that my receiver doesn’t have television RCA inputs, coax inputs, or even auxiliary RCA inputs so running my television through the speakers poses a problem.  It does have a video out connection though so it’s not totally obsolete.

I also have a problem with getting video from my DVD player to the television.  Fortunately, my receiver does have connections for a DVD/Laser Disc (yeah, it’s that old) so I can connect the DVD player to the receiver; however, because of how the room is set up, I can’t run cables directly from my various devices to the television so the receiver and accompanying wall ports are all that I have to work with.

With my current setup I can listen to a DVD, but what good is it if there’s no video?  I got to thinking about component cables, and since they’re basically just standard RCA cables on steroids (how’s that for a basic comparison?), I decided to try hooking the television up to the receiver using these via my wall ports.  It worked beautifully.  I can now see and hear a DVD but the problem of having sound piping through the speakers when just watching TV still posed a problem.  To fix this, I finally decided to unhook the VCR from the back of the receiver and use those ports for the TV which worked well.

It’s been almost a week since I started hooking up wires and praying to the gods of outdated electronics but things are finally working.  Granted, I still have two speakers and a sub-woofer that can’t be hooked up to the receiver but at least what can be working actually is.

You may be wondering why I’m sharing this little story.  I mostly just wanted to post something but there is a moral.  If you plan on building anything that could be considered “cutting edge” or “state of the art”, make sure that all of your parts are up to date.  Jury-rigging old stuff will only get you so far but, if you’re good, it can get you pretty close to where you want to be.  Unless you’re playing with rockets in Blood Gulch though, close may not be good enough.