[wdfifteen]

Thanksgiving with grandkids in the house wanting to watch TV. Ugh.

I've got a 7 or 8 year old Onkyo receiver and Logitech universal remote. They still work as well as they ever did - which is not well. The whole system is very touchy. I cringe every time Mrs WD dusts the TV area because I'm almost guaranteed to have to spend half an hour resetting something. The AV receiver is old technology that passes the sound through the HDMI to the TV, and the TV sends it back via optical cable. The cable comes loose every time you move the TV. The buttons for various settings on the front of the AV box are too easy to push. Seems like every few days I have to deal with a no sound or no picture issue, which is usually just one of the settings being out of whack. I'm really tired of hearing "HELP! The TV's not working." Put my system together with a 10 and an 11 year old on Thanksgiving day and it's disaster. I'm thinking of upgrading.

So what should I look for? I am not an audiophile. In fact, some setting has gone haywire again and only 5 of the 7 speakers put out sound. Nothing comes out of the subwoofer and I don't really care. It's not worth the hassle of going through all the settings to make it work. Again.

The system is in a big open room with terrible lighting, we don't watch action movies, don't like a lot of noise, but we do like to rock out to youtube music videos. We have a cable box, DVD player, and Apple TV connected to it and sometimes hook my laptop up to it via HDMI.

What I would like is a system that puts out decent sound and is rock solid once you get it set up. One that works well with the universal remote. Maybe a lock on it so all you can do is turn it on and off and adjust the volume unless you enter some kind of administrator code. Is that too much to ask? Have systems improved in the last 7-8 years? What is out there?