Home theater rookie with questions

[Wingman1977]

Originally Posted by Petra_Kalbrain

Well, if you are limiting your budget that much I would suggest getting the second unit. It has 3 HDMI inputs. But beware the fact that they are "HDMI PASSTHROUGH" units. I believe that means that you will have to get an optical cable in order to produce sound out of the speakers... and optical cables can't handle HD audio. "Passthrough" refers to the fact that the receiver just passes all of the HDMI signal straight through to the TV without processing any of it, not even the sound. So, your TV becomes the only outputs source for HDMI video and audio. You wouldn't be able to get TrueHD, DTS HD MA, or 5.1 PCM sound with these packages. The PCM tracks will only come through as 2 channel stereo through an optical cable.

If you are looking for a quality sound system, I'd save up $2000 first. It's 4x more than you want to pay right now, but it will be 1000x better quality and will last you a lot more than 1 year before you will want to upgrade again.

$2000 is way out of my budget. If you said close to $1000 would be a different story. Thanks for the breakdown because I'm dumb as a brick when it comes to HT.