Today’s entertainment center equipment is much more advanced than it was when Thomas Edison created the phonograph in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Audio quality then was decidedly low fidelity, and always recorded in mono on media that were easily damaged. Also, visual media for home use wouldn’t be feasible until the latter 1940s, with low fidelity pictures and very little choice in programming.
Come now to the 21st century, where there’s a multitude of cutting-edge choices for home entertainment technology. High definition, flat screen televisions are available in whatever size that will fit into your room and budget. Picture quality is near life-like, and some newer TV sets even come equipped with built in 3D technology.
There’s content aplenty, via either satellite dish or cable. (Both offer hundreds of channels.) Some new televisions can connect to the Internet, allowing you to receive streaming shows and movies. For prerecorded content, thousands of different titles come on either Blu Ray disk or DVD.
There’s also a good selection of gear for your audio enjoyment. Most newer audio systems use solid state, surround sound amplifiers. Speakers could be traditional large, floor models, or they could be more compact units that can either hang on a wall or be set on a bookshelf. If you combine surround-sound audio gear with a late-model television, you can have a movie-going experience almost like that of going out to a regular cinema.
Even though modern solid state amps sound pretty darn good, some audiophiles reject solid state, preferring tube type technology, instead. They believe that vacuum tubes give a better sound, with lower distortion than do the transistors in solid state amps.