Dangers with buying tech on a whim

I've had a Sony LED TV for a number of months now.  One of their Smart TVs.  Have been very happy with it and works very well.  Sound is much weaker and "tinny" compared to my Panasonic Plasma of a few years back, but good lord, the Sony is a lot cheaper to run.

So while out with the missus one weekend, I ended up buying a soundbar for the TV.  I got the recently announced Bose Cinemate 1SR model.  

The Bose Cinemate 1 SR - good package, let down by some feature shortcomings and the price

Nice unit, minimalist design, has wireless sub and they got me in the store 'cos they played a scene from the last Star Trek movie which demo'd to me how much of a better soundstage I would have at home using one of these.  The unit had a clunky learning remote which I could deal with, but I quickly latched on to turning the sound bar into a Sonos zone as I could connect a ZP90 to either the optical or coax digital inputs.

Mind you, the damn thing was expensive.  But off I went home, hooked it up and was reasonably satisfied with the sound via Sky, Apple TV (v1), and Blu-Ray discs.  The fun started, when I tried to connect to it to my Sonos system.

Cut a long story short. It turns out that the Bose inputs are a bit different to what you would expect.  While it has analog, optical and coax TV inputs, alongside Auxillary optical and coax, it only uses the one with the best quality signal.  Therefore, to hook up the Sonos to play music through it, either a) the TV is off and therefore not feeding an optical signal to the soundbar or b) you add an optical switcher like this one to direct one signal to the soundbar.  Bit of a pfaff, but I got it working.  

Most of all, very miffed to spend more than a grand only to add a workaround afterwards.

My fellow geeky mate in the office had been suggesting the Yamaha YSP-220 while I was doing all of this.  

Yamaha DSP-220 - the affordable sound-bar for the cinephile

I was resistant at first, but given the Bose was on a 30-day trial, I decided to give the Yammy a go. It's a full AV switching unit and unlike the Bose, it does all the signal processing inside the box. Therefore, the Sonos integration worked straight away. 

Even better, it adds the widely regarded Yammy Cinema DSP modes, a host of other features and uses such as automatically turning off the TV speakers and routing sound via the Yammy instead.  This means no need for a separate remote as the family uses the one Sky+ remote to work the TV and satellite.  And most of all, it cost £500 less and sounds as good, if not better.  Yes, you read that right.  Only downside was the wired sub, but that is now behind the TV and cabinet.

You know what happened next right?

So morale of the story, if you do buy stuff on a whim, make sure you have a no quibble return period agreed up front.  Otherwise, do your research first when buying stuff:)