But I'd like that to change, mostly because even though I get to see most of the films I want to see at the cinema, there are a few that I miss for different reasons, such as just not having the time, the dumbasses at the cinemas putting things on at inconvenient times, or the film distributors not bothering to release them in this country.
Plus there are things I'd like to see again – including a couple I wrote about earlier this year: The Avengers and Moonrise Kingdom. So, with that in mind, I bought a Blu Ray player; specifically a Pioneer BDP-150, which looks like this:
So I hooked it all up (always fun; I've got a fairly intricate home theatre setup and the back of my receiver is a nightmare of cables, and there's no a lot of light in the position it's in) and threw my copy of The Avengers in the tray to see how it looked and sounded.
It looked amazing – HD will do that – but the sound was, well, wrong. I've got a receiver capable of 6.1 in both Dolby Digital and DTS, but it was only coming through in 2.0. I tried a few other movies – The Fellowship of the Ring, which comes through as 6.1 on my dvd player – and the same thing, 2.0. I tried a few different settings and still nothing.
To the internet!
After a bit of searching, I found out what the problem was. Since my receiver, while an impressive piece of audio technology (it's a Denon and cost me more than I probably should have spent), it's also six years old, and predates HDMI. I had previously connected everything using component (for video) and digital optical (for audio), but now that every other device I have has HDMI, I've been using that and running an optical cable from the tv to the receiver.
What I (foolishly) didn't realise is that the tv isn't sophisticated enough to convert the HDMI audio into a proper multichannel signal to go through the digital optical cable to the receiver.
Anyway, my ignorance aside, what this meant was that I needed another cable to connect the player to the receiver. “Easy”, I thought to myself, “I'll just take the digital optical cable I was using to connect the dvd player to the receiver and use that”.
Uh, no. For whatever reason – other than, presumably, to make my life difficult – the new player didn't have digital optical out. That came as a bit of a shock, given that digital optical was the better/more popular pre-HDMI option than its alternative, digital coaxial.
But, no biggie; I'd just head down to the store – in this instance, the Hectorville Good Guys, only a few minutes away from my place – and pick one up.
Once again, no. Remember how I just mentioned that I thought digital optical was more popular? That's exactly what the people at the store thought as well; there were about two dozen different varieties of that particular kind of cable - brands, lengths, plug metal etc. to choose from.
Varieties of digital coaxial cable to choose from, on the other hand? Zero. Not a one.
"Fine", I thought, "plenty of other places around - but I'll check the webpages of the local stores first so I don't have to spend all day driving around only to find they, like the one I've already tried, hadn't got the memo that people might need coaxial digital cable.
Am rather glad I did, because the three places I checked online – major suppliers of such equipment – didn't appear to have it either. So, after more than a little swearing, I decided to try an actual online store, since I couldn't imagine that there wouldn't be somewhere that would stock what is a pretty standard item - well, except in the stores we have in Adelaide, apparently.
So, I found one – the rather oddly named Cable Chick – who had a huge range and what I can only assume are excellent prices; I picked one for which I paid all of $8.95, plus $2 postage.
Actually, come to think of it, I think maybe I do know why they aren't stocking it locally, since an equivalent digital optical costs 4-5 times that much. Which I'd almost certainly have paid if did already have one and wasn't forced by necessity to buy the alternative.
I'm aware that it's the sort of thing that a specialist hi-fi store would almost certainly have had, but by the time I'd done all of this sodding about, it was late in Sunday afternoon, and I had a friend's dinner party to attend, so I didn't have the time to find out, either then or during the week - since there aren't (to my knowledge) any specialist hi-fi places near my work.
A few days later, the package arrived, and I had my cable. After a bit more sodding about at the rear of the two devices, and playing with the input and output settings of both, I had it all hooked up and giving me the awesome sound quality I'm probably far too precious about.
Time to watch me up some movies!
No comments:
Post a Comment