Wayne,

Relax.. I don't think anyone has been trying to play you for the fool here. From my perspective the tone of your post is very defensive, and it's coming out of left field. I read everything up to your post as mostly friendly discussion, but clearly you felt attacked. We all have different opinions here, but I think at the end of the day most of us still respect one another.

I don't think it's fair to broadly say that equipment bearing a THX logo is high quality any more than it's fair to say that any gear with a THX logo is junk. It's a multi-tiered for-pay certification program, and I think that many of us feel that it's a lot more marketing-heavy than technical-heavy. Had they stuck to their high-end criteria only, I think many of us would have more respect for the mark.

However, they made a smart business decision and realized there were going to be many more low and mid-grade products sold in the HT marketplace, and realized they could cash in on that by segmenting their certifications. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that Joe Sixpack thinks buying a cheap $200 receiver with a THX logo from the local big box is getting him something special over some other piece of gear without the logo, when in reality a portion of the unit cost had to go to lining Lucas's pockets for the license fees.

I do think it's great that they established criteria against which equipment (and rooms) can be measured, but as evidenced by the dearth of junk at the big boxes with the THX logo, an unqualified "my unit is THX certified" is meaningless. It's great for their business because it's a household brand (within our niche of interest anyway), but it's meaningless from a technical standpoint.

It is unfortunate that there is not another standards body which has a set of standards by which HT systems could be measured. Unfortunately all we do have is a company that collects license fees for the certification, thus putting them in a bit of a conflict of interest situation.