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You can get OTA tuners for incredibly cheap. Like $30 for a basic one. These come with the bonus of allowing you to plug in a USB HDD and record live TV. For a

You can get OTA tuners for incredibly cheap. Like $30 for a basic one. These come with the bonus of allowing you to plug in a USB HDD and record live TV. For a little more you can get a HDHomeRun or Tablo and have a network connected tuner so you can stream live TV to tablets or phones and streaming boxes like the FireTV. Powered bookshelf speakers are also an alternative to soundbars. I personally use a monitor as a TV. One con is that some devices like the Fire Stick don't send HDMI display off signals but instead a black screen in sleep mode which wakes the monitor and keeps it on. You need a smart switch to easily turn it off.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I would assume most setups leveraging a monitor as the display would also be going through an AVR and that should take care of this kind of thing?
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Sound bars and powered speakers are also an option and don't require an AVR but also typically don't offer HDMI/AV pass-through at least on the cheaper side. Going the AVR route adds even more cost and more space as a decent sound bar or powered speaker set costs less then even a low-end AVR. I went the monitor route as I just don't have room for both a desktop PC setup and a TV. I do have an HDMI switch with audio extractor but that also picks up on the Fire TV stick and auto switches to it. TBH it's just a design flaw with the Fire TV and I really wish Amazon would fix it but I bet it saves them 7 cents or something to do it this way.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    That's good to know. I've been through a few units (Denon, Pioneer, Onkyo) and they really feel like the weakest link in my setup, with fussy menus and strange failure modes involving cryptic error codes— the Denon in particular would go into a fault state that was probably a thermal problem but might also have been a voltage regulation issue. It's definitely overkill given that I'm only driving stereo speakers anyway, so maybe next time I have issues I'll go this direction.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I would assume most setups leveraging a monitor as the display would also be going through an AVR and that should take care of this kind of thing?

salamandersauce 5y ago
Sound bars and powered speakers are also an option and don't require an AVR but also typically don't offer HDMI/AV pass-through at least on the cheaper side. Going the AVR route adds even more cost and more space as a decent sound bar or powered speaker set costs less then even a low-end AVR. I went the monitor route as I just don't have room for both a desktop PC setup and a TV. I do have an HDMI switch with audio extractor but that also picks up on the Fire TV stick and auto switches to it. TBH it's just a design flaw with the Fire TV and I really wish Amazon would fix it but I bet it saves them 7 cents or something to do it this way.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  That's good to know. I've been through a few units (Denon, Pioneer, Onkyo) and they really feel like the weakest link in my setup, with fussy menus and strange failure modes involving cryptic error codes— the Denon in particular would go into a fault state that was probably a thermal problem but might also have been a voltage regulation issue. It's definitely overkill given that I'm only driving stereo speakers anyway, so maybe next time I have issues I'll go this direction.