Congrats Sir on your grand setup,what a big room you have With your ceiling height you wont be needing presence speakers anymore And you are correct investing in top notch gears kasi hindi sya nawawalan ng silbi in the long run (iwas upgrade every so often ) like yung setup ko 3yrs na and im still enjoying it Im a big fan of JBL speakers as well bec hard to beat yung dialogue clarity nya and they are so durable Also Sir Most setups abroad uses the video scaler thats why they're not to keen with the new HD players,kasi as you've said hard to notice yung difference esp in big screens and titles are so expensive din for them they're just buying the consoles for the games and not to much for the movies
Your comment on buying top-notch gear is right, because for the longest time, I haven't changed my speakers, power amps, interconnects, speaker cables, line conditioner ...
But with respect to source equipment, I haven't been as lucky:
1) I have a very good cassette deck which is useless
2) Same with S-VHS deck and laser disc player
3) I used to have a high-end Sony DVD player and a very cheap Chinese DVD player. I once ran the same material on both and switched between the 2 sources. Mas maganda pa ang output ng Chinese DVD player. Kakainis!
Tapos after 2 years, nasira yung Sony DVD player. Wala na.
Same thing with AVR's which I actually use as pre-pro's. I originally had a Yamaha DSP A-1. It was pretty good and it lasted mga 4 or 5 years siguro tapos namatay.
Then I got a Sony TA-E9000 ES which was very good but it lasted only a few years cuz I got the Denon AVR-2807, which has the newer flavors of DD and DTS, as well as the Audyssey technology. Technology kasi ...
Re the JBL, yes my center speaker is fantastic. The dialogue is very clear. At tama ka, ang tibay ng JBL.
With regard to video processors, d ako very sure. The DVDO VP-50 is not just a scaler, it's a video processor. It's quite exotic cuz there are maybe only 4 or 5 major manufacturers of video processors, and they are still pretty expensive right now. I don't think the mass market of consumers is very aware of video processors. Most of them use the deinterlacers and scalers found in DVD players and AVR's, but these are pretty inferior compared to the dedicated video processor.
Anyway, thanks for the post.
Cheers!