(He sits typing, and running his hands through his sweaty hair in great frustration...)
OK, I spent a good hour or so today searching this site and the internet. I used to think I was pretty well up on home theater setups. I researched for almost a year before buying my Vandersteens and my Panasonic A110 and neither has ever disappointed me. I still cannot decipher what all I need to make this damn TV work correctly and I don't grasp the first thing about why I have to take a digital source (Blu-ray), using a digital cable, and processed through a digital receiver, and make sure it's outputting in analog. Let me lay out for you exactly what I have here and perhaps someone can explain this as though I were a four-year-old, because evidently since I first got into HT that's what I've regressed to.
The recevier is a Kenwood 1080VR, DD, says right on the front "full digital decoding". After searching around I understand receivers right around my time frame (1997 or so) were hit or miss as to whether they could support 640kbps or not through the digital optical input. I did find one poster in a forum who said his 1080VR worked fine with 640 Kbps DD.
I understand I will not be able to use HDMI output because when my receiver was made it wasn't even invented yet. However, does this also automatically mean I need a Blu-Ray player that has analog output, and that now I have to hook up my receiver through RCA jacks on the back? What does that do to sound and picture quality? How will it compare with my current DVD's SQ & PQ? Do you get any sort of 5.1 sound out of it? Will this be any sort of an upgrade at all?
I am beginning to get extremely frustrated with this whole deal. I brought the new TV home and was immediately disappointed in the picture. Oh, yeah, and I can only watch it in 4:3 with my satellite box. And the satellite picture is barely watchable (horrendous PQ) through the coax input, current DVD uses the sole S-vid, neither source has component or HDMI. OK, no problem. Replace the DVD with Blu-Ray so the cable box can use S-vid (although it'll still be 4:3), right? No. Now I find out in order to do that I either need to dumb down the signal or else buy a new receiver. And, all this time I'm going to be using it as a stop-gap until I get my NAD 514 Cd player fixed.
So, in order to get a TV for 50% off, I need to replace every component in a home theater system that I was perfectly satisfied with to begin with.
Someone, please give me some good news.
Darel
The bad news is, time marches on, and they make progress with better formats, so you need to do research every time you decide to buy home theater equipment if you want to get the most for your money. The good news is, time marches on, and they make progress with better formats, so you can get a better picture and better sound.
The "full digital decoding" of your receiver is no longer true, as there are new digital formats. And given that dts has been around a while on DVDs, it hasn't been true for a long time. But when it was made, it may have been true, so we can't say they were lying to you.
With a Blu-Ray player, with your equipment, the best way to hook it up would be with HDMI for video straight to the TV, and use something else to send the audio from the player to your receiver. (HDMI is capable of sending both audio and video, but, as noted, your receiver has no HDMI inputs, so you can't use it with your receiver.) With the video going via HDMI straight to the TV, if things are set up properly and if you view it at an appropriate viewing distance, you will get a noticeably better picture from BD than with DVD. How noticeable will depend upon exactly how big the screen is and how far you sit from it.
Now, your receiver cannot decode the new digital audio formats, nor can it even accept them digitally, because the new digital formats cannot be sent via optical or coaxial digital. Unfortunately, if I am correctly reading the manual for your receiver, it cannot accept multichannel analog either (just 2 channel stereo analog audio). This means that, with your receiver, you cannot hear the new audio formats properly decoded. So, if you are going to be using your current receiver, you will want to see if you can get a BD player that can convert audio to Dolby Digital (which you would hook up via optical or coaxial digital), or (unless the movie has as one of its options a DD soundtrack; many do, though I do not know if they all do) you will end up using 2 channel analog connections to your receiver, which could be processed with Dolby Pro Logic (DPL).
So, the upshot is this: You can use the receiver you now have and you will be able to hear the movie, but the sound will be degraded from what the discs are typically going to have. This means that, if you cannot afford a new receiver, you still can watch BD discs and have a better picture quality, but you will not get any sound advantage with your current gear, and might even be stuck with DPL in some cases. It should still sound good, but not as good as is possible. If you cannot afford a new receiver, you should not let this worry you too much, but if you can afford it, it would be a good idea to replace it. Unfortunately, the resale value of surround receivers is very low, because everyone else needs the new gear for the new sound, too.
Regarding your satellite picture quality, I get the impression that this is your first HDTV, and that previously you had a standard analog TV. Is that correct? If so, the satellite equipment you have is probably designed to work best with a standard TV, and will probably not give you an HD picture. However, it should be that it does not look much worse than a DVD on your TV. The first thing to do is read the manual for the TV and make sure you set it up properly, preferably with a test disc for this purpose, so that you can get the best picture possible from your current gear.
If the adjustments do not solve your problem, you should start a new thread about this issue of picture quality, and someone else might be able to help you. I do not use satellite, so I would be the wrong person to try to walk you through much with it.
