The Journey Begins...

Well, actually, the journey began a little while back.  This is the story of how and why it began.

It wasn't a dark, stormy night.  There was no assistant named Igor, and the special effects budget was limited to the occasional flickering of the lights due to the dodgy wiring in our old house.  This monster was going to have to be brought into being in an unconventional and totally un-movie like manner.  Oh well.

I think it might have been a Sunday afternoon around 2:30pm - baby number 2 wasn't quite born yet, and little fella number 1 was happily having his afternoon nap.  I had previously had the thought that I wouldn't mind being able to play blu-ray movies and I was browsing the internet to see what specs I needed for a PC that was capable of doing that.  The setup at the time went thusly:

• Marantz SR5600 AV Receiver (nice piece of mid-range kit);
• Pentium 4 2.6GHz Media PC with Asus Xonar D2/PM sound card providing S/PDIF audio to the Marantz;
• nVidia GeForce7 series card for the visuals fed directly to;
• InFocus IN76 1080i projector (nice!);
• Paradigm Titan front speakers and Jamo (can't remember the model number) centre, surrounds and sub.

I quickly discovered that the old P4 just wasn't going to cut it for blu-ray, so I started toying with some ideas for upgrading.  The first thing that occurred to me was whether I should forget about going the home theatre PC (HTPC) route and just get a nice processor/power amp combo with a capable player, as I had heard that setting up a HTPC, particularly for blu-ray, was "interesting" to put it politely.

I do so like a challenge, though, and there were other things that only a HTPC can provide, so I put the processor/power amp combo idea on the backburner.  The concepts I wanted to adhere to were:

• Central location for playing all media (music, DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc.);
• Minimise the number of components;
• A HTPC that was capable of acting as a pretty decent processor and pre-amp in itself, in addition to all the other functions that it can perform;
• Easily upgradeable without having to invest in expensive pieces of additional hardware;
• Audio-focussed - I like good quality audio so I needed all components to be selected around that.

So that's where the journey started.  Next blog, I'll go into bringing the concepts to life and selecting components.