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This comes up every few months in the outdoor and second-TV threads, usually with someone insisting a big panel left running will wreck the power bill, so here is the arithmetic. A 55-inch drawing 100W left on for a full 24 hours, at 18 cents a kilowatt hour, comes to roughly 43 cents a day...

If you are half way through a 5.1 in an open plan room with a vaulted ceiling, stop trying to get the two surrounds into different planes. That is the mistake hiding inside every option list I see for rooms like this. The setup in question: slanted ceiling running at about 25 degrees all the...

Three years of dark walls and a white ceiling, and the ceiling won. Someone posted their basement build where they painted the walls dark during the original renovation and left the ceiling light to keep the peace at home, lived with it, and finally repainted this month because the screen was...

I spent the better part of a year convinced my receiver was underpowered before working out that I had done it to myself. Speakers set to Large is the big one. If your mains are running full range, the amp is handing deep bass to a pair of bookshelves that physically cannot reproduce it...

Saw another post from someone who finally bought an AC Infinity setup for their rack, called it pricey but cheaper than frying a receiver, and I recognised myself from about two years ago. My AVR lives in a cabinet with a door, because that is the furniture we own and nobody was going to let me...

Everyone tells you to turn off motion smoothing, and yes, do that. But if you have just set up a new set and it still looks inconsistent, the ambient light sensor is the one quietly undoing your work. It ships enabled on basically everything now, it is tuned aggressively, and it will keep...

What Hi-Fi has put up a phone-to-TV guide and the useful part is the distinction most people never get told. Casting hands the job to the TV, which then streams the content itself while your phone acts as a remote, so you can leave the app, take a call or switch the screen off and playback keeps...

Someone posted a bedroom setup asking whether 9 feet between left and right is a problem when they sit about 10 feet 5 inches back, with a hallway opening just off the right speaker. The equal sided triangle thing gets repeated so often that people treat it as a rule, and it really is not. It is...

Someone was planning to strap two USB fans to the sides of a Denon S770H and run them off the receiver's own USB port to pull the hot air out. There is plenty of space either side of the unit and about an inch to an inch and a half above it. I have been down this road and it does not do what you...

Someone finished a basement build this summer and the part that caught me was not the theater itself, it was the room outside it. Eleven by fourteen for the main space with a projector, then an overflow room through the doors with a sectional seating eight and an LG CX with a soundbar, and an...

A bedroom setup post caught my attention because the numbers in it are the ones people agonise over for no good reason. Roughly ten and a half feet back from the speakers, the pair about nine feet apart, and the question is whether the room needs rearranging to widen that spacing because...

There is a thread running where someone in Auckland wants two rooms roughly 20m apart, multiple walls between them, joined over CAT6. He wants HDMI 2.1 at 4K120 and USB running in both directions, so the PC can feed the TV in one room while the PS5 feeds the monitor in the other, with KVM...

Someone bought a house that came with a dedicated theater already built in the basement. Dated, but good bones, and he is not looking to spend heavily, just make it usable and reasonably future proof while he replaces pieces. What is in the rack now: a Marantz SR8002 with what sounds like a...

Fifth run at Multi-Sub Optimizer and this one finally clicked, going by a post I read this morning. Two SB-3000s at the rear, two Pretium 18s up front, all four into a miniDSP feeding an Onkyo RZ70 running Dirac with bass control, measured before DBC went on. He had also stopped toeing the front...

Since the redesign started rolling out in late May this keeps coming up, so here is the short answer: Roku does not give you a way back. Once the new home screen lands on your set or player, the old app grid is gone. What you do get is a handful of settings that let you switch off most of what...

Engadget ran a reminder piece on this and it is worth repeating here because it catches people every single year. New televisions frequently ship with store or demo mode already enabled, including sets bought online that never sat on a shelf under a single fluorescent tube. The mode cranks the...

Saw this one over on r/hometheater and it is the nightmare version of every rental I have stayed in. Guests check out, the cleaners arrive and find the TV on the floor, the owner messages them asking how they intend to pay for it. Nobody was in the room when it came down. The thing is, the wall...

Alastair Stevenson at What Hi-Fi has written up the thing I have been muttering about for years: people have got better at choosing a TV and are still terrible at putting it somewhere sensible. His specific complaint is the set parked directly beside a window, worst during summer, and I have...

Wondering how to connect Alexa to your Smart TV so you can control it hands-free? Whether you want to turn the TV on with your voice, launch apps like Netflix, or control the volume, this guide walks you through everything you need to know. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know exactly how...

In today’s world of binge-worthy series and on-demand entertainment, streaming content on a Smart TV has become the norm. But if you're wondering how streaming actually works on a Smart TV, you're not alone. Whether you're new to Smart TVs or just curious about the tech behind it, this article...