Quick note about a great article about online Video download services

HDTV Magazine has a must read article for all of us who complain about our Cable/Satellite Services entitled "A Comparison of Movie Download Services".
Really, don't miss this article, it's a quick review of the current and future Video Content download services. Very well done!

Appologies a Rant and a Sale

Apologies
Hello again to all of our old and new customers who were kind enough to subscribe to our email newsletter. We would like to make apologies, especially to our older subscribers as to the state of our current "upgraded" site. Our old site,while enjoyed by many people was very "old school". It was painstakingly "hand made" and had as much helpful content as we could manage to add. But it's 2008! So we had to move to a modern way of doing things. It's been hard to do. And we are way far from finished.
One painful decision was between copying our old content onto the new site or creating lots of entirely new, fresh content. We kept and updated some of our more in-depth content but decided on completely rewriting most of the rest of the site. While it may seem crazy to want to rewrite content for hundreds of pages, we are actually enjoying it. It's what we like to do - explain the basics of various forms of interconnectivity and help people understand and successfully use them.

Here are a few examples of our new content:
Video Converters
Networking
USB Cables


Of course we still offer updated versions of some of our best old sites content on our support page and all of our blog, Connectivity Today is still available.


A Rant
The upgrade to HD quality DVD player scam
DVD players that claim to convert your DVD to HD quality (1080i,1080p,720p) for your HD display are a scam. The marketing here is complete nonsense.
Your TV is going to convert the signal it is given to its own natural, resolution and refresh rate. If it is a 720p LCD it will convert whatever it is given to that. If it is a 1080p display, it will convert everything it is given to that. Feeding your HDTV 1080p from a DVD player may or may not be better than feeding it 480i, depending on the video processing of the HDTV and DVD player. Over and over, people don't get this. It is not just the player! People buying Pioneer Plasmas over the those off-brand LCD's are not just rich and obsessed with black level. Video processing is actually worth money. There are a lot of smart people paying a lot of money for stand-alone video processors. Why? Because they highly value the picture quality they are rewarded with. Putting a bit more into your TV purchase, or DVD/Blu Ray purchase can make a big difference in the resulting picture quality you watch, day in and day out for years to come. If you are obsessed with getting that 1080p signal from some oh so inexpensive upscaling DVD player to your HDTV, you really need to rethink how your system works. In a lot of cases your final picture quality will be better with an old, 480i or 480p DVD player of high quality (and they are selling for cheap). Of course you could just get an Oppo or on sale HD-DVD player to do very nice upscaling. It's never going to look like a true HD source with a good looking movie, though.

A Sale
We have a 15% off sale on Liberty THX Certified Optical Digital Audio Toslink cables
This week only?!

What the heck are HDMI Amplified/Equalized Cables

HDMI "Amplified/Equalized" Cables
Here's one question that initially was a head scratcher. What's an HDMI "Amplified" cable? It is not "snake oil" unless the amplifier or equalizer is using "electro-static-intermagnetic-resonance amplification" or anything having to do with pyramids.
Well first off, there are really two types of "amplified" cables; Repeaters and equalized cables. A repeater recieves the cables signals, (which are actually split up for proper transmission over HDMI cable) re-combines them, and if its function is simply as a repeater, it splits them up again for transmission over HDMI cables again. It does help clean up signals and allows for longer combined cable runs, but that's not really its purpose. An equalizer cable is similar to the equalizers used in Pro Analog gear to correct for high frequency loss over long cable runs. It takes the signal and digitally equalizes the signal to correct for high frequency losses over long HDMI cable runs. The equalization is matched to the cable, so for best results, cables with built-in proprietary equalization will be more capable than adding a seperate booster/equalizer, or a receiving Switcher with built-in equaliztion. The difference between "designed for the cable" (built-in) and external (seperate booster/equalizers or integrated into switchers) varies widely, it can be marginal, or enough to make a large difference in bit errors, depending on the cables and associated equipment.

Note1: An Equalizer should be used at the end of the cable run, or close to it.
Note: There are those that claim that since digital cables just send 1's and 0's that means that if the cable "works" it is perfect. This is a bit off-base. The closer you get to the "digital cliff" where the signal goes out completely, the more bit errors are likely to occur in a complex "system" like the transmitter-cable-receiver system. This results in video artifacts like "sparkles" where various pixels in the display are of random color values. If bit errors are infrequent enough, they may not be noticed, but large amounts will render the video outcome unwatchable.

So do you need one of these things? It depends. How long is your cable run? If it is long, such as for a projector, or in-wall cabling an above fireplace plasma from across the room, it is likely. If it is not so long, such as for a normal receiver or Cable/Satellite/DVD/Blu Ray player to HDTV connection then you don't.
Bad - image with lots of "sparkles"

Good - No "sparkles"


These images are just resized photographs (ok, not very good photos) of actual bit error artifacts caused by long cable runs. The second image is with the addition of a simple external booster/equalizer with the same cables, and an additional cable for the EQ device to the display.

Stupid weeny nerd complaints about speaker manufacturer choices

A Ground Breaking Investigative series! *

Dispersion of speaker drivers and crossover frequencies in speakers is bothering me a lot lately. It really bugs me that in expensive speakers 6 inch drivers and a growing number of larger drivers are very often crossed over in the 2.5KHz range. It's a general rule that a drivers dispersion pattern narrows to about 90 degrees at the frequency where the diameter is equal to one wavelength. For 2.5KHz , that means 5.4 inches. Sure, if you sit in an anechoic chamber, with the speakers facing you, who cares? In a normal room, dispersion patterns play a large role in how you hear those esoterically named things like "soundstage" or "space" around instruments. With uneven responses to dispersion over the drivers spectrum the instruments will seem to "displace" within the space depending on the instruments frequency output. With regard to center cones, waveguides and alternative materials with different breakup modes - while they may help, a quick look at the in depth measurements from Stereophile among other sources will show you that with oversize drivers there is, in the end, a bad dispersion range. Same trouble for all of those 1" dome tweeters, no matter how fancy the waveguide or materials, etc, once past 10KHz things are going to get lossy on the sides real quick. If you're living in a anechoic chamber, who cares? I'm not living in one. Having some frequencies dispersed at 120 degrees or more and others at radically different dispersion angles equals overall room disparities. So, don't just blame your room for "room" problems, your speaker is often just as much to blame.
So why the big move towards two way speakers with even larger mid/woofers, real big midranges, and no super tweeters?? Dynamics is the quick answer. Louder. Cheaper is the second answer, two drivers, instead of three or four. Cheaper. Don't get me wrong, there are many great speakers out there with just such disparities that sound fantastic. They need just the right room.

*Well, just a silly rant actually.

OLD HDTV to HDMI?

We get questions all the time about connecting older HDTV's with no DVI HDMI inputs to up-converting DVD, Blu Ray player or Cable/Satellite Boxes. It's a bit of a tricky question as we mentioned when first posting about the HD Fury device back in June, 2007. You basically need two devices. The first device (HD Fury) , and this is the "key" device since the other one has a lot of options out there, but this one is very rare if not currently unique. It is also not sold in the U.S. and is seemingly not legal to do so. It converts HDMI video signals at standard HD resolutions up to 1080p into RGB analog video signal of the same resolution as the input. The tricky bit is it seems to remove any problems usually caused by HDCP with similar converters . Is that legal? Well maybe not, but if you bought an early HDTV, before the motion picture industry decided they should screw all early adopters, then it is the only way you can get the highest possible resolution video from many video sources.
The second tricky bit is that for many of these HDTV's you still have to convert from RGB to Y-Pr-Pb (Component Video). For that you'll need a RGB to Component video transcoder like the Audioauthority 9A60.

The bad part of all this is not so much the whole ordering equipment of questionable legality from overseas as it is the overall cost for both items is over $250 before shipping. This makes it a very tough decision indeed for older HDTV owners. Then again, for owners of expensive CRT Front projectors it is a very worthwhile device.