I needed someone to pinch me. It was a man’s dream.

Driving back from the family holidays, I heard my wife say, “You know, I’m really getting tired of looking at that big, bulky TV in the living room. I like the nice, thin ones that my friends have.”

I nearly wrecked the van.

After we got home we didn’t discuss it again for a while. I didn’t take any action because I didn’t really believe it was a possibility. When we finally did take action, we wasted a lot of effort that involved much drilling. Let’s start in early February.

In one weekend we played Wii on a neighbor’s plasma and watched the Super Bowl on another friend’s LCD. Quite by accident, I had been surrounded by HDTV technology, and sucked into the widescreen aspect ratio. Our current TV was an HDTV, but it was a Sony WEGA Trinitron with a nearly square shape (the 4:3 aspect ratio), so HD content looked pretty small when letterboxed on the 36″ screen.

I combed the internet for TV deals and reviews, from “experts” and consumers. I decided that 42″ would be plenty large for our modest living room and that I wanted 1080p if we were going to take the plunge (despite some reports stating that 720p is indistinguishable from 1080p on anything smaller than 50″).

Within a day Shannon had filed our taxes electronically and picked out and ordered the perfect stand for a TV that size — a positively reviewed piece that included room for A/V components in the middle and storage on each end.

My end of the project awarded the largest chunk of the tax refund, I took the decision seriously. Wary of having large, sensitive electronics shipped from an online retailer, I found the set I wanted locally for a lower price, and a full $500 cheaper than Best Buy. After taxes, it would cost $10 more than if I had ordered online, but I would boost the local economy. Score!

On a recent Friday, after a harrowing (for one of my passengers) drive down I-75 Hwy. 75 despite going against the flow of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, we reached Fry’s Electronics. Oddly, the store’s exterior featured a deck full of longhorn steer sculptures. Inside was more of the same cowboy theme, with horses, wagons, and steer on the walls and old-west building facades on the end caps. “Hey, cookie, take them beans off the fire, and swap out my video card while you’re at it.”

Friendly salesman Larry confirmed that the set was available and sent us to walk the candy-lined gauntlet to the cash registers. The candy selection at every Fry’s dwarfs anything found in convenience stores and makes parents quake at the thought of traversing it with kids in tow.

“I’m thirsty,” Benjamin said. That was all. He knows by now not to beg us for candy.

I walked him to the refrigerated drink cases. About 20 minutes after we had arrived we walked out of the store with our new TV and, for Benjamin, a Sprite Zero.

Guess which one excited the 5-year-old more?

At home that night, pumped about our purchase, I was ready to unpack our new toy space-saving television. Thwarting me was the 250-pound “bowhemoth” that had adorned our living room since shortly after our summer 2005 move to Texas, and I needed help. Nobody on Facebook took me up on my offer of free beer or other beverage, and my nearby buddy Mr. B was down with the winter sinus gunk.

In a last-ditch attempt, I scampered across the street to ask a neighbor friend — skinnier than I — to help me. Amazingly, we managed to slide it, still on its proprietary stand, around the corner and down a short hallway to a corner in the master bedroom. Although the coffee table seemed hesitant at first to serve as temporary substitute for the piece Shannon had ordered, it didn’t buckle when we carefully set the new TV on top of it.

The picture quality was glorious. As tauted, the blacks were deep and true (blacks are really just dark gray on many HDTV’s).

At some point between that evening and the next afternoon, Shannon decided she would like the TV to hang on the wall. Then she and I took a break from home theater and enjoyed a double-feature date night at the Cinemark. The next afternoon Ben and I went to the store and picked out a universal hanging kit, and with Shannon’s assistance I installed it that evening after Benjamin was in bed.

Anyone who knows me at all should stop now to appreciate the speed with which I completed all of this. For at least two years I had been “meaning to” install the small fan I had bought to help pull heat from the previous TV stand.

Did I mention how excited I was to get this TV?

Our son gets credit for the assist; he slept through my drilling of four pilot holes with a very loud electric drill, not to mention the preliminary nail hammering to make sure I had the right spot. We live in a small, one-story home, so sound travels very well to all rooms. Attaboy, kiddo.

Only problem was, despite our best efforts and my very long level (thank you very much), the TV hung slightly crooked. On top of that, Benjamin himself said, “Shouldn’t the TV go higher?”

Despite our decision to hang the TV on the wall, we still needed a place to put the DVR, PS3, etc. On Tuesday I arrived home to find Shannon putting the finishing touches on the TV stand that had arrived that day. She just couldn’t wait until I got home. In the past this impatience has been known to spell disaster, but this time she seemed to have pulled it off quite nicely.

We shoved the stand against the entertainment wall, which made the new TV look even more crooked. As I worked to load the A/V components into the new stand, I discovered that our receiver was too deep to fit in the middle section. That didn’t make me happy at all.

I hate it when a plan falls apart.

“Son, you only have about two more minutes to finish brushing your teeth,” I said that night as I contemplated a new direction in the project. (We’ve learned that the boy responds much better to a ticking timer than to our open-ended nagging.)

I lifted the 70-pound screen off the wall bracket and lowered it onto its shiny black “foot” on the new stand. It looked good there, I thought to myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have to go through the ordeal of re-hanging the wall bracket.

Shannon liked the way it looked on the stand much better, but after trying various arrangements we quickly realized that there was nowhere for the receiver or the center channel to go in this new piece of furniture. Colored silver and gray, respectively, either looked hideously hulking up top. The center channel had rested nicely on a shelf that fit on top of our prior TV, but the new, thin panel would not accommodate that at all.

Notice: If you are not interested in the geeky details of the audio problems I faced, then skip the next paragraph.

(begin geeky technical paragraph)In addition to the physical problems of making everything work, I had technical problems with the receiver because its only digital inputs were an optical port and a coaxial port. The new TV at first seemed perfect for that because it had a digital optical out that could pass through the audio signal from any of the HDMI inputs. Sadly, I learned that many PS3 games send their sound through the optical out but not the HDMI cable. So, while music played on the PS3 came through fine with this configuration, LittleBigPlanet and a borrowed game looked great but were perfectly silent. This retained a complexity I thought the new TV would fix — for digital sound from the PS3, I had to connect it directly to my receiver’s optical input. So, I had to choose whether the PS3 or the DVR would play through the surround system. That or get a switchbox, which I certainly couldn’t see adding at that point. My best, but least feasible alternative? Buy a new receiver that will accommodate HDMI inputs as well as optical audio.(end geeky technical paragraph).

The next day it came to me: our humble living room is not a media room. If there comes a time when we can have a surround sound system that works in that setup, then fine. In the meantime, we can live with all the sound coming out of the TV speakers. I don’t really need to hear a dinosaur coming at me from behind me to my left, nor feel it rumble the ground.

Wednesday evening I took the receiver and its speakers out of the equation, and then hooked up everything as if they didn’t exist. A sense of euphoria washed over me as I absorbed the sheer simplicity. It was wickedly easy to run everything like that.

Then I realized that I can have that same simplicity with a new, slightly smaller receiver that manages all the inputs and sends the signal to the TV; a more discrete center channel; and a programmable remote control that turns on everything with one button. Whether we go that far or not, it would be a shame to watch such an attractive, high-performance TV with sound no better than my Dad’s set from 1982.

Tucking away the money here and there is the tricky part, but setting a goal is half the battle.

Click to enlarge.
And, no, those candles never will be lit.