So, in an effort to stimulate the economy, celebrate Father's Day and generally waste my own time and money, I decided to buy a new AV Receiver today. I can't say I needed a new AV Receiver, but I'm vaguely considering a few new HDMI devices in the not-too-distant future, and thought it'd be nice to lay the groundwork for them while cleaning up my existing setup.
My home theater setup right now is borderline annoying. I've got a cheesy Home Theater in a Box setup that I bought ages ago, an HD cable box, a non-HD dual tuner Tivo, an HDMI switcher (since my TV only has one HDMI input), a standard def (but HDMI upconverting) DVD changer and the TV itself. In all this leads to five basic activities: watching Tivo, watching HD cable, watching HD cable with surround sound, watching DVDs and watching DVDs with surround sound. (Six activities if you also count the external input for the TV, which we use for video games and blowing up the laptop.)
We also have a Logitech Harmony remote to manage all this crap, since otherwise I'd have six different remotes to wrangle.
The amount of cabling in this setup is borderline obscene and difficult to get at. Most of the cabling to the TV is 4 meters long to accommodate the hidden wiring, and since everything has its own separate audio, there are wires running left everywhere.
My goal in a new AV receiver was to eliminate the HDMI switch, and possibly consolidate some of the audio cables into the HDMI. I found a nice mid-range Pioneer unit I liked that was on sale at Best Buy, so I picked it up. It can even talk nice with the iPhone!
The first hour or so went smoothly, removing the existing unit and hooking up speakers and the DVD player. Then came time for the HD cable box. Plug in the HDMI and the screen flashes: "The HD content protection of your display has been compromised. Please use the YPbPr outputs for your HD connection." It does this for 20 seconds and then goes black. Off to google I go...
It turns out that the box I have from Charter cable is particularly sensitive in the HDCP handshake required with the TV, and my new receiver doesn't seem to handle it. Which means that I can't use the receiver with my existing cable box through HDMI. It IS possible to go through component cables, so I wander down to the basement and dig out a set I have down there. No dice. After spending 15 minutes hooking them up, it turns out that I can't have a setup with component cables in and HDMI out. I don't have a spare 4 meter component cable, so I'm shit out of luck.
So, I spent 30 minutes un-hooking the new receiver and hooking the old one back up, and now I've got to re-pack my receiver and return it. Not because it doesn't work, but because it doesn't play nice with my system thanks to some fairly pedantic protocol negotiation aimed at stopping people from copying digital movies.
My buddy Josh pointed out this excellent recent Onion article that describes my experience perfectly, and wonderfully profanely.
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work
Sunday, June 21, 2009
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1 comments:
Sarah thought I'd appreciate your post, and I have to say, you have my utmost sympathy.
I am particularly anal when it comes to running cables (from my days working concerts in mid-sized arenas). I buy cable ties by the 100s and will spend hours rebundling audio, video and power cables to keep them pretty neat.
We have yet to take the "flatty panel HDTV" plunge yet, so I haven't had to concern myself with connectivity problems like your experiencing.
I hope you can find a receiver that plays nice with your box. Denon is always at the top of my list. Sucks that you can't trust the people you pay to provide you with HD content to let you enjoy it the way YOU want.
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