please help

[Unregistered]

I am just a dumb college kid who heppened to work at best buy over the summer so i was able to make some money and buy some speakers and a dvd player at a good price. so now i am stuck with an old tv that just has the three color cable hook-ups, an alright pioneer VSX-D412 reciever, a new Toshiba 5 disc cd/dvd/superdvd player, a vcr, a ps2 & 4.1 audio (i was not able to save up enough money to get the center channel but was under the impression that i can have my tv act as the center for the time being). Now that i have all of this stuff i have no idea how the heck to hook it all. Every place that i look at assumes that my tv has an s-video hook-up or something fancy and not some old red-white-yellow cables. if anyone can point me to a book or a website that would show me what the heck i need to do and what cables i need to buy i would be a very happy kid. any help at all would be very nice. thank you.

 

[Leprkon]

put tab A in slot B....

your set-up will be easy enough, if your TV has some sort of video input, hopefully the red-white-yellow you mentioned. the red and white are your sound inputs, left and right side stereo. The yellow picture is your video signal.

the simplest way would be to feed the video signal from the dvd player into the TV using the yellow input. you might not want to bother feeding the audio from the dvd in there.. it'll sound alot better coming out of your receiver, so plug the audio feed from the dvd into the receiver as either DVD or Auxiliary (depending on your available inputs). of course, then you will have to turn on the receiver every time you want to play a dvd, but it's the cleanest and simplest.

use the coax from your rabbit ears or cable into the vcr, run a second coax from the vcr to the tv. that should get all your video inputs into the TV. if you have left and right audio outputs from the vcr, run them into the receiver as Tape 1 or Tape 2. you will still get sound to the TV through the coax, so you won't have to turn on the receiver every time for either the TV or the VCR, but you can when you want to. run your TV on channel 3 or 4, depending on your VCR, when you want to watch a tape. run the DVD on the "video" or "video1" signal on the TV.

note: your VCR may have audio inputs as well as outputs. if you plan to record from dvd to vhs (good luck, since many of them are copy-protected), you will need to run a third set of audio patch cords from THE RECEIVER to the vcr (not from the dvd, which gets plugged into the receiver).

in summary, you need one short run (6 feet or so, depending on the set-up) of coax cable, rabbit ears or coax from the cable box, two standard sets of stereo patch cords with RCA jacks (one for the sound from the vcr and one from the dvd player) and one video cable with RCA jacks (it will probably be yellow, and might be available as a set with one of the "normal" stereo patch cords). In any case, you want it to be shielded and have a rating of 75 ohms for the best picture clarity. You can get by with $ 35 for some halfway decent cables from your local Walmart or Radio Shack.

then start saving up for that center channel.

welcome to the addictive hobby of HT !!

 

[Unregistered]

thanks man. u rock. i think i will now be able to set everything up.