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11 Ways Home Theater Used to Suck	ENTERTAINMENT
A look back at the fossils of entertainment. By Gerasimos Manolatos

Natalie Dormer

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Kaley Cuoco

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One night, a man and his lady friend were about to enter his apartment…

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Television

Then: 1981 Zenith Console TV
C'mon in to Big Dave's TV Bonanza for this living room fixture that'll have your friends and neighbors buzzing! The unit features dual ~~liquor cabinets~~ speakers for the complete Dallas mono experience, all in a nimble 75,000-pound frame!

Now: 47-inch Zenith LCD TV
Space-saving and more efficient LCD televisions are becoming the living room norm. Which means grandma can live inside the house now.

Video Format

Then: VHS
After a format war with Sony's Betamax and Philips' Video 2000, JVC's Video Home System became the standard. Maxim tip: Rip all the tape out of the cartridge and you have an instant video tape mummy Halloween costume. (At least that's how it was at our house.)

Now: Blu-Ray
After a format war with Toshiba's HD DVD, Sony's Blu-ray won out, packing its hardware into both stand-alone units and PlayStation 3 consoles. Desperate to sell off remaining inventory, Toshiba debuted its new line of HD coasters earlier this year.

Additional Channels

Then: UHF
You'd think owning something called "ultra high frequency" would make all of the neighborhood kids jealous of your sweet set-up. But UHF was free (as long as you had the annoying antenna) and all you really got were public access channels broadcasting local idiots from their garages.

Now: Cable
For just $389.99 a month (plus taxes, tolls, duties, surcharges, fees, and tithes to the sun god Shamash), you get ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN Philippines, 19 HBOs, and 2,700 other channels re-running Law & Order.

Video Recording Devices

Then: VCR
It's got, uh, a play button.

Now: TiVo
These contraptions allow you to pause live television and have a built-in hard drive with enough space to store weeks of video. On a related note, we'd appreciate it if everyone would stop sending in those election night spoilers; we're not even up to 10 PM yet.

Video Rental

Then: Blockbuster Video
Opened in 1985, Blockbuster Video was the place to go and get your Saturday night flicks. Now it's just "the place that looks like a Best Buy" when you're giving directions.

Now: NetFlix
Johnny Come Lately's taken over the industry, boasting more than eight million subscribers and a library of over 100,000 titles. Now we're simply waiting for the launch of NetChix and we won't have to leave our apartment!

Video Game Consoles

Then: Atari 2600
Before everything turned to shit in the video game crash of 1983, the 2600 entertained young'uns with games like Pitfall!, Space Invaders, and, everyone's favorite, Tax Avoiders. We wish we were kidding.

Now: PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 / Nintendo Wii
These days, video game consoles play movies, employ impressive motion sensors, and pull off a magic trick called the "Red Ring of Death."

Radio

Then: Grundig Yacht Boy Radio
When these AM/FM bad boys hit the market, Dio never sounded so good. Frankly, they're like a raindow in the dark.

Now: Sirius Satellite Radio
Without censorship, we finally found out what [bleep]ing [bleep]suckers really meant.

Remote Control

Then: 43 Remote Controls
Every time you brought home another home theater accessory meant spending 90 minutes re-choreographing the remote control Kabuki dance to turn on your home theater system.

Now: Logitech Harmony One
With one controller to rule them all, new clickers have begun organizing underground movements against the new technology.

TV Signal Revolution

Then: Color
As President-elect Barack Obama would say: "There's no black television. There's no white television. There are the united colors of television."

Now: HD
The good: You can actually see where the ball is during Sunday Night Football. The bad: You can see the smell under John Madden's turkey neck during Sunday Night Football.

Audio Player

Then: Cassette Player
Quite useful—except when recording a song from the radio. It was almost impossible to get the whole intro because the asshole disc jockey would talk right up until the vocals started.

Now: iPod Dock System
Rendering music radio useless, iPods make the jump to home theater with the appropriate dock, allowing you to download and play all of your totally-paid-for favorite songs anytime you want.

Sound Quality

Then: Dolby Surround
Hoping to bring a more theater-like atmosphere to largely mono-exclusive home entertainment, Dolby Surround encoded audio in three channels: left, right, and rear. For example, as opposed to The A-Team's Mr. T screaming at you from just your TV, you were verbally attacked from three angles.

Now: Dolby Digital and DTS
Sure, today's standard 5.1 and 7.1 speaker systems are remarkable, but the Japanese have better things to do than frolic in today's technology. They've already started funding projects to make 22.2-channel surround sound (that's 24 speakers, folks) ultra high-definition the standard TV frequency, great for apartment dwellers with wall-to-wall carpetspeakers.

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[1/6/2009]