So, the prior system, as reported here in the past, was a surprisingly lovable Maxent 50" Plasma display. It was made in 2005, and I bought it at Costco for a couple of grand (why is it that I feel like I made more money in those days?). It has no over-the-air television tuner, and only two HDMI inputs, which, of course, support old HDMI standards. It also has inputs for component video, composite video, and stereo audio outs. In other words, adequately but not abundantly equipped for interfaces even by 2005 standards.
And the panel supported 720P based on processing power, but its native resolution was 1080. Since it lacked the processing power for 1080P, it only support 1080i at native resolution.
All that was fine with us--the plasma picture quality was and still is quite good, even if the resolution is low by today's standards. But without a tuner, we needed a Samsung OTA ATSC tuner, and I can't get those to work for more than about a week, it seems. Those were all made in the deeps of time and I think with lousy capacitors, but I haven't open any of my three corpses yet. I could not tolerate the cheapness of a no-name generic ATSC tuner, particularly its remote. So I was struggling to sustain OTA capability, despite having an excellent large OTA antenna on a tower that I stood up during Covid. We have a Blu-Ray player as well, plugged into the AVR using HDMI.
The AVR is a Yamaha RX-V683, a fairly modest mid-grade model from perhaps five or six years ago that I bought preowned on eBay for cheap. It works pretty well and it came with the calibrated microphone for Yamaha's automatic setup. Speakers are old Linn Index Pluses for fronts, a Pioneer center, a couple of Polk Audio RTS-15's for the surrounds, and a Boston Acoustics powered sub. In others words, quite a modest setup from an audio perspective, but good enough for movies and TV-watching in Chez Denney.
As mentioned, the main source was not the OTA antenna. Our main source was DirecTV, with the tuner connecting to the AVR via HDMI. We used DirecTV simply because our 10-down and 2-up terrestrial microwave Internet service wasn't up to streaming television. We have no linear infrastructure out here in rural Loudoun County, despite that yet another government grant to run fiber to our road has apparently ended with the money spent and no fiber installed. That's the second time this has happened (the prior occasion was during the late aughts when Verizon made it as far as installing orange duct, which they never terminated or populated and is now abandoned--the latest attempt was supposed to use aerial fiber), and I really wonder why the grant auditors aren't asking for the money back.
We've given up on fiber in our lifetimes, and the price of DirecTV has finally sent me over the edge. We have therefore finally been assimilated into the Starlink Borg. SpaceEx had a deal with free equipment and no-contract residential monthly service at $83 a month, so I ordered it a couple of weeks ago. I installed that on Saturday and integrated it with our home Peplink router, and we now enjoy somewhere between 35 and 150 down and 25-35 up, via WiFi through the not-particularly-new router. This is revolutionary.
That solved the data rate issue, and I bought a used AppleTV 4K on eBay to interface the fast internet into the TV. I have an AppleTV box on my TV downstairs that I have used only for YouTube-watching, and that has worked well enough with the prior slowish data if at times at reduced resolution (on an old 42" Samsung 720P plasma TV, but without the added complexity of surround sound or an AVR.)
When I plugged the AppleTV box into the Maxent display's HDMI port directly, it worked but at 720P--the AppleTV box has no 1080i capability. That gave me picture, but there was no way to send 5.1 audio to the AVR. (Obviously, the Maxent does not support ARC). Okay. But when I tried to route that AppleTV box through the Yamaha, nothing doing. I got perfect audio, but no video. The Yamaha was doing something to the video stream that the Maxent display could not process, or the Yamaha could not process what it was getting from the AppleTV box. I suspect the former, but I don't know and now I don't care.
Oooookay. The time has come for a separation. I'm sorry it had to end this way. It's not you, it's me. You're still beautiful, but we just couldn't communicate any longer.
And so we bought a Sony Bravia XR8B OLED TV, the 55" version of which was on sale at Best Buy for under a grand. That was the price threshold for a proper OLED display that I was waiting for, and only OLED can compete with plasma for the wide-angle viewing required in our room.
My reading suggested that I would have to work at integration with the Yamaha AVR, but it was not so. I plugged a good HDMI cable from the ARC/eARC socket on the Sony TV into the HDMI Out socket on the Yamaha, and It Just Worked. The simplistic remote for the Sony is sufficient to control everything--literally. When I turn on the Blu-Ray player, the Yamaha automatically switches to that input. When I turn on the TV, the Yamaha automatically switches to the ARC-enabled TV for video and audio input. I don't know how it works, but it does. No fiddling with the settings on either device was required. Of course, the Sony TV has an ATSC tuner built in, as all TV's are now required to have, and so the OTA backup is now handled in the TV itself. And I went from a 125-pound Plasma display to a larger (the picture is larger, but the enclosure is smaller) 40-pound OLED display.
The TV comes with GoogleTV, so we have opted for YouTubeTV for our general television programming and we don't need the AppleTV box at all for this setup. The basic cost is about $83 a month, and even if we add 4K service and a movie-channel package, the combination of YouTubeTV and Starlink will still be less than what we have been paying for DirecTV, and we get fast internet into the bargain.
I moved the new (to me) AppleTV 4K box into the bedroom where it now serves YouTubeTV to a pre-smart 42" Phillips LED TV.
We also purchased a Samsung 42" 4K television to use as a computer monitor on my wife's laptop. This is transformational for her. She gets the screen real estate of four 21" 1K monitors with only one HDMI cable (and the Lenovo laptop she uses only has one HDMI socket). She's into trading and can put all her analysis screens side-by-side on the display. Rarely have I bought tech that excited her as much as this did, and earning points with her never gets old even if we do. Of course, she can also watch TV on that monitor (via YouTubeTV) while doing her other things.
Now you guys are going to try to persuade me to stream audio. I can hear it now.
Rick "not quite emotionally ready to take the still-working Maxent to the landfill" Denney
And the panel supported 720P based on processing power, but its native resolution was 1080. Since it lacked the processing power for 1080P, it only support 1080i at native resolution.
All that was fine with us--the plasma picture quality was and still is quite good, even if the resolution is low by today's standards. But without a tuner, we needed a Samsung OTA ATSC tuner, and I can't get those to work for more than about a week, it seems. Those were all made in the deeps of time and I think with lousy capacitors, but I haven't open any of my three corpses yet. I could not tolerate the cheapness of a no-name generic ATSC tuner, particularly its remote. So I was struggling to sustain OTA capability, despite having an excellent large OTA antenna on a tower that I stood up during Covid. We have a Blu-Ray player as well, plugged into the AVR using HDMI.
The AVR is a Yamaha RX-V683, a fairly modest mid-grade model from perhaps five or six years ago that I bought preowned on eBay for cheap. It works pretty well and it came with the calibrated microphone for Yamaha's automatic setup. Speakers are old Linn Index Pluses for fronts, a Pioneer center, a couple of Polk Audio RTS-15's for the surrounds, and a Boston Acoustics powered sub. In others words, quite a modest setup from an audio perspective, but good enough for movies and TV-watching in Chez Denney.
As mentioned, the main source was not the OTA antenna. Our main source was DirecTV, with the tuner connecting to the AVR via HDMI. We used DirecTV simply because our 10-down and 2-up terrestrial microwave Internet service wasn't up to streaming television. We have no linear infrastructure out here in rural Loudoun County, despite that yet another government grant to run fiber to our road has apparently ended with the money spent and no fiber installed. That's the second time this has happened (the prior occasion was during the late aughts when Verizon made it as far as installing orange duct, which they never terminated or populated and is now abandoned--the latest attempt was supposed to use aerial fiber), and I really wonder why the grant auditors aren't asking for the money back.
We've given up on fiber in our lifetimes, and the price of DirecTV has finally sent me over the edge. We have therefore finally been assimilated into the Starlink Borg. SpaceEx had a deal with free equipment and no-contract residential monthly service at $83 a month, so I ordered it a couple of weeks ago. I installed that on Saturday and integrated it with our home Peplink router, and we now enjoy somewhere between 35 and 150 down and 25-35 up, via WiFi through the not-particularly-new router. This is revolutionary.
That solved the data rate issue, and I bought a used AppleTV 4K on eBay to interface the fast internet into the TV. I have an AppleTV box on my TV downstairs that I have used only for YouTube-watching, and that has worked well enough with the prior slowish data if at times at reduced resolution (on an old 42" Samsung 720P plasma TV, but without the added complexity of surround sound or an AVR.)
When I plugged the AppleTV box into the Maxent display's HDMI port directly, it worked but at 720P--the AppleTV box has no 1080i capability. That gave me picture, but there was no way to send 5.1 audio to the AVR. (Obviously, the Maxent does not support ARC). Okay. But when I tried to route that AppleTV box through the Yamaha, nothing doing. I got perfect audio, but no video. The Yamaha was doing something to the video stream that the Maxent display could not process, or the Yamaha could not process what it was getting from the AppleTV box. I suspect the former, but I don't know and now I don't care.
Oooookay. The time has come for a separation. I'm sorry it had to end this way. It's not you, it's me. You're still beautiful, but we just couldn't communicate any longer.
And so we bought a Sony Bravia XR8B OLED TV, the 55" version of which was on sale at Best Buy for under a grand. That was the price threshold for a proper OLED display that I was waiting for, and only OLED can compete with plasma for the wide-angle viewing required in our room.
My reading suggested that I would have to work at integration with the Yamaha AVR, but it was not so. I plugged a good HDMI cable from the ARC/eARC socket on the Sony TV into the HDMI Out socket on the Yamaha, and It Just Worked. The simplistic remote for the Sony is sufficient to control everything--literally. When I turn on the Blu-Ray player, the Yamaha automatically switches to that input. When I turn on the TV, the Yamaha automatically switches to the ARC-enabled TV for video and audio input. I don't know how it works, but it does. No fiddling with the settings on either device was required. Of course, the Sony TV has an ATSC tuner built in, as all TV's are now required to have, and so the OTA backup is now handled in the TV itself. And I went from a 125-pound Plasma display to a larger (the picture is larger, but the enclosure is smaller) 40-pound OLED display.
The TV comes with GoogleTV, so we have opted for YouTubeTV for our general television programming and we don't need the AppleTV box at all for this setup. The basic cost is about $83 a month, and even if we add 4K service and a movie-channel package, the combination of YouTubeTV and Starlink will still be less than what we have been paying for DirecTV, and we get fast internet into the bargain.
I moved the new (to me) AppleTV 4K box into the bedroom where it now serves YouTubeTV to a pre-smart 42" Phillips LED TV.
We also purchased a Samsung 42" 4K television to use as a computer monitor on my wife's laptop. This is transformational for her. She gets the screen real estate of four 21" 1K monitors with only one HDMI cable (and the Lenovo laptop she uses only has one HDMI socket). She's into trading and can put all her analysis screens side-by-side on the display. Rarely have I bought tech that excited her as much as this did, and earning points with her never gets old even if we do. Of course, she can also watch TV on that monitor (via YouTubeTV) while doing her other things.
Now you guys are going to try to persuade me to stream audio. I can hear it now.
Rick "not quite emotionally ready to take the still-working Maxent to the landfill" Denney
