Am I the only one here who dreadfully hates cooling fans?
The a/v geek in me will always want to check out the latest and greatest gear, but I'm getting sick of all the new gear running hotter and hotter. I'm even more sick of gear that requires cooling fans. Now... don't get me wrong. I'd rather have a cooling fan than a fire, but there is a crossroads where I must decide whether having hot gear with cooling fans is worth it just so that I can have the newest technologies. I have an open rack and while I'd hope this would aide in keeping equipment cool, it also means that fan noise easily reaches my ears.
I'm more understanding of the need for cooling fans on game consoles, but I dislike the fact that we are seeing them on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, receiver/amps, and televisions...
Today I stole the HDMI cable that I was using for my Toshiba HD-A3 high-def player and gave it back to my Oppo upconverting DVD player. I didn't notice any Image Contrant on the couple of movies I tested on HD-DVD via component cables, so I'm keeping this setup for the remainder of the Toshiba's useful life. Of course, I'm not making much of a stand since HD-DVD is a dying format. But I'd still have been tempted to make the move since the cooling fan in the HD-DVD player is so annoying! The Oppo, without a fan, is much quieter, which I really appreciate for concert DVDs. But even for regular DVD movies I really should be using the Oppo, anyway. (It's easily my best source for DVD-Video when upconverted, despite the recently hip idea that my plasma television's built-in scaler may be better---it's not, btw.)
And I really would like a new receiver with HDMI so that I could take advantage of the new high-resolution, lossless audio formats such as TrueHD or uncompressed PCM. But I don't think I will be buying anything new at this point and time. Not because I don't have the desire or the means, but rather because the only receivers that have all the features I require tend to run very hot. And at least one of the Onkyo's---the 705---is claimed to have a cooling fan in there somewhere that one reviewer at Amazon complained ran all too frequently.
I guess hoping for rapid advancement and maturity of recent technologies is my only hope for happiness. C'mon, it's time to develop and manufacture all those cooler running chips and whatnot, folks!!!!
---Kazaam
