Customer Reviews

Home Video: Choosing, Maintaining, and Repairing Your Home Theater System

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I was thoroughly disappointed in this book. The author is a master of the obvious. There is not even the most basic information for a complete novice, let alone someone considering "maintaining and repairing your home theater." For instance, you get a detailed description of the author's "wet, dingy, 5'8" basement. You do get insight on the finer points of building with particleboard and on digging down to your footer to tar your foundation. The advice given on designing a room for a home theater is to avoid parallel walls or else include a sofa and overstuffed chairs to absorb echoes. Other sage advice is to cover your windows to avoid glare. Four full pages are devoted to informing the reader that computers are getting faster and cheaper. Wow! Insightful! The book is full of typos and convoluted sentences. It could not have been proofread. It is as if the author had nothing to say and took 339 pages to say it.

Incredibly, he completely avoids AC3, Dolby Digital, DTS, component video, and similar areas I hoped to learn about. The rest of the book was either overly technical or uselessly vague. This author appears to know little about home theater and a lot about ham radio. It's a poor quality book, and I wouldn't expect this from McGraw-Hill.

This author is definitely NOT well versed in the home theater realm. There is very little mention of how to hook up your home entertainment system either. He talks a lot about useless and/or obvious information, voicing his opinions (if you can call them that) about the feature benefits of a laserdisc player. Isn't that kind of old news? Give me a break! He does write some useful information regarding the science of radio and tv broadcast. I bought the book at a local store and returned it the next day.