Once upon a time there were 3 bears. They were neighbors who lived in a nice little row of 3 houses. Each bear had a nice family of 5. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but bears love technology. All 3 bear families were constantly trying to 1 up each other with the latest and greatest devices. It started with typewriters, turntables, and microwaves, and is still going strong with computers, mp3 players, and of course home theater systems.
The each bear family was constantly on the prowl for more high tech gadgets. As such, the bear families were often disappointed with the quality of performance of their latest acquisition. But bears, being stubborn, refused to wait until the technology was proven. Instead they would jump in as soon as a product came to market. The bears had all owned laserdisc, betamax players, minidisk players, various video game systems, and many other items, all the way up to HD DVD. Each family was getting ready to expand their home theater system to include the new Blu-Ray players that had just been released, and each was also planning on upgrading various other components at the same time. The only problem was that the bear economy was not doing well at all, and each was on a limited budget.
The first bear family went out and spent top dollar, mostly with credit cards. They purchased a high end projector for the living room, and plasma displays for each of the bedrooms. Each room needed its own Blu-Ray player, as well as a home theater receiver and speakers. They ended up spending a lot of money, but were pleased with the results.
The second bear family was not willing to go into debt on this endeavor. They decided to stick with their older plasma and regular DVDs. They were not very happy.
The third bear family took a middle ground approach. They also purchased a projector for the main room and plasmas for the bedrooms. But they decided to use a 3x5 component video matrix selector switch from impact acoustics. This allowed them to purchase a single Blu-Ray player, but pipe the feed into each room via component cables. They also were able to route the audio from that player via TOSLINK cables to the surround receiver in each bedroom. This bear family mostly liked watching movies at different times, so this was a great solution for them. They took the money they saved by not buying multiple Blu-Ray players, and eventually used that to purchase a media center PC, which was also piped into each room via the matrix selector.
This bear family then invited all their neighbors over to watch movies, putting aside any rivalries they used to have. Even bear family number one, with their high end system, had to admit that bear family three made a wise choice.
