Documentation about your system.

[3dbinCanada]

With the advent of Home Theater and multichannel systems, complexity shot up a 1000%. The heart of home theater, the audio video receiver (AVR), has become very complex through the ever increasing number of channels and features being added on an almost yearly basis. Compare the owners manual for an integrated amp or stereo receiver verses that of the AVR as an example; 27 pages for a CR-2040 top of the line stereo receiver (1979-1982) compared to a 160 pages for an older RX-A1060 AVR (2016). Reading the AVR's owners manual is now mandatory if one wants to extract the best possible sonic performance from their system. Maybe, I'm slower on the uptake but I find that I have to refer the owners manuals a few times to understand exactly what the feature I'm looking at does. Poorly written manuals only exaggerates the problem.

So here we are, equipment manuals read and understood, system is setup to our liking and we go long blissfully for several years enjoying our system. Something stops working!! Now what? A quick glance behind the equipment stack shows all interconnects and wiring intact but is it? Its too messy back there to go through all the wiring. A quick poke through all the menus of all the equipment shows everything is status quo but is it? Did someone (most likely you) experiment with the equipment because you discovered yet another feature? Maybe you added a new piece of equipment and it may work but some other piece that was there from day one stops. Stuff happens.

I've had all three of these examples happen to me. The cats play in the back and knock off a connection, I experimented with a feature too late in the evening and forgot about it temporarily the next day. I wired in a new piece of equipment and it worked but something else stopped because of a menu setup or I knocked some pre-existing connection lose. I kept saying to myself, if only I documented on paper or computer, the setup of my system including AVR configurations and a good wiring diagram.

Have any of you experienced any of the examples above or some other problem? Have you documented your system once it was completed to your liking?

 

[3dbinCanada]

I'm in the process of writing a build book (for a few reasons) for my bedroom system which is the easiest and simplest of the three AVR based systems that I have. The reasons are; 1). I'm getting older and my memory isn't what it once was. Who am I kidding, it was never there but at sometime in the future, I'm sure it will get worse. 2). Allowing me to restore the system to the baseline after tinkering with it. and 3.) trouble shooting a problem.

Here are a couple of example that I experienced yesterday.

1.) Going through the documentation process ( I call them build-books) I discovered that the AVR in the master bedroom has blue-tooth capability. This allowed me to ditch the cheap blue-tooth to stereo converter and has freed up a pair of connections on the back of the AVR as well thus reducing the wiring complexity.

2.) I incorporate screen shots with some explanation in this build book. I took lots of pics of the scene memory settings but spotted inconsistencies among them. I cleaned those memory settings up, deleted the 80 or so old pics that I took to support the build-book, took about 1/4 of new ones reflecting the cleaned version of the scene setups. I also figured out how I was going to tackle the writing of that section which also helped in reducing the number of pics required. After cleaning up the scene inconsistencies, I decided to reprogram my old Logitech remote but I could not remember the account or password for the old remote. I subsequently had to reprogram the thing from scratch; adding 6 devices, adding 8 activities, learning some IR commands from the original remotes, adding additional buttons to the screens and putting in a new wall paper background to improve on the legibility of the screen. The new corrected scene pics I took sure saved me a lot of time with setting up the remote.

The remote pics