With all the (perfectly understandable) anger over the audio separation issues in the Wii version of Guitar Hero III, I decided to finally make time today to set my surround sound system back up. You see, I had it installed before I moved a little over a year ago, and never got around to getting it back up and running in my new home, though I tried and couldn’t get it to work properly.

I spent some time tonight online trying to figure out why the hours of work today getting everything mounted back on the walls and snaking wires around my toddler’s toys into safe places behind the furniture had amounted to nothing, and it turns out as always, it all comes down to a lack of component inputs on the various devices sitting on and in my TV stand.

You see, something has to decode the audio coming out of my Wii, because it doesn’t have its own decoder like my DVD player does. I had always assumed my stereo receiver had the decoder in it, because I got some great surround while playing DVDs through it where I used to live. Unfortunately, when I moved in here we got a cable box so I could get HDTV channels, and that consumed one of the two component inputs on the back of my TV set. My Wii claimed the other when it replaced my Gamecube, and the DVD was bumped to an S-Video connection… which robbed me of the surround decoding ability.

So now I’ve got a DVD player with lousy audio and lousy video, a Wii with good video and lousy audio, and a cable box with good video (it’s HD, you know) and a terrible remote that doesn’t do anything well. Not that the remote has anything to do with any of this, but you know, I really dislike that remote.

Needless to say, my surround speakers sit silent. Maybe I can have the stereo simulate something, but what’s the point? I need a receiver that will decode the audio, and I need a TV with more inputs. Or I need to start buying game consoles that play DVDs, for crying out loud.