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(More customer reviews)My couch is over 45 degrees off axis from all of the equipment in my media cabinet. Prior to installing this I'd have to walk over to point the various remotes through the glass at the gear. Now I can control everything anywhere on the L-shaped couch, or even anywhere in the room since I mounted the receiver where it has clear line-of-sight to anywhere I'm likely to be.
The receiver in this kit is a tiny black rectangle that I stuck to bottom edge of the wall-mounted 50" Plasma monitor, which always faces the viewer and is up high. The size of the main controller module is also very small. I stuck that to the back of the media cabinet and ran the IR emitters to the gear (Panasonic, Sony, Denon, Verizon FIOS). There are red LEDs in both the receiver and at the emitters that light when hit by a remote signal so you can tell when things are working.
Electrically it couldn't be easier to assemble... it all just plugs together. I used an extender 1/4" stereo cable from Radio Shack to make the receiver cable long enough to reach from the monitor to the controller, which fits the plug on the receiver assy and controller perfectly. The most tedious job was figuring out where the IR receiver was on each piece of gear, and then carefully running and mounting the delicate emitter wires and emitters to the gear inside the cabinet. I used a flashlight to peer through the plastic gear faceplates to locate the IR receivers, and then verified by putting the emitters over them to see if the gear reacted to signals.
A downside with this system is that the emitters may need to be pried off the gear if you need to pull something out. Fortunately this is not hard to do with care, and the sticky film re-attaches fine. I've had to do this once, and I need to do it again to replace a single emitter with a dual for new gear (now need 5 emitters total... could go up to 8 max using duals).
These remotes are advertised for controlling equipment in another room, but based on my experience having gear get into out-of-sync power-on states I could see that being a nuisance, requiring a trip to the closet to diagnose. This isn't a problem of this repeater so much as not being sure what gear gets turned on by what remotes, and not being able to tell w/o looking at the gear.
I chose this unit because it has the new broader bandwidth being used by modern equipment, and because it is more immune to plasma flicker and florescent lighting. It works perfectly with all the remotes and all the manufacturers gear I have. It's great. I love it.
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