HD-We

In what is an early 30th birthday present for me, the Series3 HD Tivo arrived yesterday. It's great. Setup was a breeze. I had ordered a DVI--->HDMI cable from amazon since the Sony 32" has a DVI input and the Tivo is HDMI-out. Cable worked fine. HDMI carries both audio and video but since the Denon receiver I have doesn't have HDMI (see my future receiver here...) I just used an optical cable to handle the audio.

When a local radio shack closed I picked up an antenna for over the air HD broadcasts. I hooked it up to the Series3 and picked up HD signals. Stunning. They look great on the Sony. The weird thing is, I can't pick up WBBM (CBS) but I guess that is normal since they kinda got shafted by the FCC and got something of a crummy channel. What's funny is that for broadcast television CBS has always come in crummy in the Chicago area. ABC, FOX, NBC, WTTW, and a bunch of other stations come in flawlessly though...and it's free over-the-air TV. Fantastic!

Today I'm going to go to the comcast office to pick up 2 CableCards, which are credit card-sized devices which allow you to receive digital cable without a cablebox. These will be put into the Series3 to allow us to pick up HD Cable channels and other digital channels such as Sci-Fi and others. There have been some issues with other people getting the Cards and getting them to work, but we'll see what happens.

Arriving today (I believe) are the in-ceiling speakers I ordered. These will serve as our surround speakers. In FL, we had Sony bookshelf speakers on speaker stands that were on either side of our couch. In our new home this wouldn't really work out, so I decided to go the ceiling route. It will take some work (and crawling around in both the crawlspace and the attic) but when it's done it will look sharp and work great.

And like I said, the Sony looks great, but I can't help feeling that this on this is on the horizon eventually...