Going HDMI

For my birthday, I got a new digital audio/video receiver to complete and bring together the different pieces of our home entertainment system which has been assembled over the years. I started installing it this past week and knew that I could get myself in a lot of trouble technically and socially (the family needs their Tivo and their dad/husband) if I let it drag too long. Fortunately, with some grace and patience from the girls and some web trolling for digital audio and video reference and advice, I finally have it to the point where I am happy with it.

I thought I would put down what I learned here in case I need to refer back some time down the road and also for the benefit of anyone that might be making the jump to a digital a/v system.

DIGITAL VIDEO
Gathering from the diagram at the beginning of this post, HDTV is not nearly as simple or clear (irony intended) as one would expect a digital video technology to be. Not only is it a matter of resolution, but then there’s the matter of progressive [p] or interlaced [i]. It really comes down to what each piece of hardware can handle and maximizing the quality as best as possible without creating undue complexity for regular use. The new receiver has the capacity and capability to make this possible.

The quality of the signal depends primarily on the connections, cables and encoding and whether they are digital or analog, and preserving the signal from each individual source all the way to the screen. So, at present, the highest connection / cable technology is HDMI (thus the title of this post), which stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface.

HDMI, as its name would suggest, actually incorporates and combines both digital video and audio into the same cable connection. Unfortunately, real life is not so simple as to allow all devices to be so consistent and compatible. Here are a few technical challenges / lessons in going with HDMI.

The first problem was more a result of too many options offered by the new receiver. Using HDMI with the receiver, I could upscale (in a sense, upgrade) the video signals from each source to higher quality resolutions, the highest being 1080i. But when I did that, it essentially forced all the video to be widescreen, completely filling the HDTV screen, but distorting those sources which were produced at a different aspect ratio. This was fine if you didn’t mind seeing images that were out of proportion and as one web resource (HDTVoice.com) indicated, our eyes tend to adjust and filter out those distortions after a while.

However, after looking into the resolution quality discussion at HDTVoice.com, I learned that most analog video looks pretty good upscaled to 480p, and particularly with LCD screens, going to 1080i does not provide that much of an increase in picture quality. Fortunately, the new receiver is intelligent enough to not upscale those video signals that are higher than the target resolution. Another interesting fact is that component video should be considered on par with HDMI or DVI in terms of picture quality.

Anyways, once I settled on upscaling the analog signals to 480p, I noticed that my LCD screen was automatically changing the zoom mode to accommodate for the aspect ratio of the video source. I had basically two Tivo’s sending analog video, but I had one hooked up via S-Video and the other via composite video (RCA). The strange thing was that the LCD screen was automatically choosing a different zoom setting for each of them. It turns out that S-Video for some reason indicates a different aspect ratio. So even though S-Video is technically a higher quality connection, in this case, it turned out to be the wrong choice. Once I switched both Tivo’s back to composite video, it was much easier to handle the zoom settings.

The last challenge doesn’t have a happy ending but I was able to do a workaround. It turns out that with a digital video connection to the LCD screen, the closed captioning information gets stripped out. The reason I needed closed captioning was because at nights when the girls are sleeping, I normally turn the volume low and just read the captions. Unfortunately, there is no way to have the higher quality digital video and the captioning at the same time (at least not that I could find with existing equipment). I ended up connecting a composite video cable to the monitor out connection on the receiver directly to the LCD screen. So when I wanted the captions, I would have to forego the digital connection, route around and switch the LCD to receive the analog signal.

DIGITAL AUDIO
This was not nearly as complicated as the video side since digital audio for the most part has been around longer than digital video. I even got to use a cable that I had purchased 10 years before to test out digital audio quality back then. Let’s start with what worked first.

With the new receiver, I was able to upgrade the audio connection of the DVD player and XBOX 360 to digital using optical cables (yeah, go figure, optical for audio). What was additionally impressive was that the receiver could sense the connection type and also receive audio encoding information from the digital source to select which surround decoding program to use. Everyone says that you have to play the XBOX 360 on an HDTV to appreciate the video quality, I would venture to say that the digital audio output from the 360 is equally as stunning and necessary to the gaming experience.

Now for the confusing bit, and once again, it’s a matter of too many choices, or in this instance, too many speakers. Originally, with surround sound, it was a matter of 5.1 or 5 speakers plus one subwoofer. In the 10 years since I purchased my original a/v receiver, they went and upgraded the surround specifications to 7.1 or 7 speaker signals plus one subwoofer. I say speaker signals for 7.1 because in actuality, the number of speakers is more like 9 since two of the signals have dual symmetrical positions.

Anyways, I took the simpler road, and decided to ignore the two new audio signals, until at such time my living room can actually accommodate that many speakers in a non-intrusive way. I think you would really need a bigger room and probably a custom room and built-in speaker configuration to take full advantage of the digital audio technology, but that’s for some time down the line.

Did It Work?
When Rebecca first saw the remote for the new receiver, she was more than a little skeptical about having to learn how to use it. One of my objectives was to make it such that there would be little change to how we actually use the system via our existing universal remote, and yet still be able to take advantage of the new receiver and digital connections.

In the end, the only change in user behavior was to use the ‘off’ button to shutdown the components rather than simply pushing the ‘power/on’ button. As for the improvements to the audio and video, Rebecca commented that the video picture looks better than before, which is all the validation that I could hope for

I wanted to thank Rebecca for being patient with me and allowing me to work on the system even though I was sick and should have spent more time resting. And I wanted to thank my parents for offering to pay for the receiver as my birthday present from them.