Saturday night of Thanksgiving break I got to hook up my GFs HTIB system.

I brought two items:
- New 18 AWG speaker wire (biggest that fits in the spring clips, same as what came with it)
- My trusty Ideal strippers.

PITA FACTOR HIGH:
1) TV stand with the equipment location 6 inches off the floor, prepare to lay down to do this.

2) TV stand door does not come off, so good luck reaching around to pass cables to yourself from front to rear.

3) Masonite back panel with small oblong passthrough for cabling, lined up to be of use to absolutely nothing.

4) Cabinet is so shallow that the door still hit the front panel knobs when its as far back as it can go on the test fitting (the system was setup in this cabinet, somehow, before I helped her move.

5) So take it all out, cut an access in the rear panel, reassemble the whole damn thing and terminate the cabling.

6) Once it's in the cabinet and the door closes (the door is glass panels in a frame) the frame of the door blocks the IR pickup on the HTIB receiver. I don't have ANYTHING with me for repeating IR, so I just propped the whole unit up on an inverted dinner plate so the remote can see the unit.

7) The access hole that I cut into the rear panel is now too short, so the back panel is hitting the fragile spring clip speaker terminations and the little RF dongle for the remotely located surround speaker amp. So I modified the rear panel AGAIN.

8) I mentioned the remote rear speaker amp thing, it's causing the whole system to shut off intermittently... "Oh, our old dog chewed on the wire. Double check that for me." Yes, and some 'helpful' person twisted and taped the wires back together (leaving the splices right next to each other). The tape job was sloppy and loose, and the pos and neg splices were TOUCHING under the tape. I don't have any crimp caps, butt splices, solder, or heat shrink. All I can do is move the twist and tape splice of the positive up the cable a few inches, and leave the neg where it is. At least it can't physically touch to short out anymore until I can get back to make it right.

9) I used the TV do manage the HDMI switching, and used the Toslink audio out to feed signal to the HTIB. "It's not the way it was before." she said. I labeled the inputs on the TV and made it as simple as I could.

When it was all done, she made me some pie and we settled in on the couch for some blu-rays and Netflix. It was all worth it.