Video Asylum

Posted by spons (A) on May 11, 2004 at 16:47:51

In Reply to: Anyone have HD DirecTV with the HD TiVo? posted by AbeCollins on May 07, 2004 at 22:26:43:

Abe,

I took delivery of my DirecTV HR10-250 just last Friday. I was lucky to find it available on the Circuit City website, where it has been available sporadically for the last week or so. It is not branded, as all receivers will now just have the DirecTV logo on the front instead of the manufacturer's logo.

My initial impressions compared to my Samsung SIR-TS160 HD DirecTV/Off-Air unit:

1. The off-air tuner is either much less sensitive or is more sensitive to antenna alignment. Stations I received easily on the Samsung pixelated on the TiVo, requiring fine-tuning of the antenna. Going to http://www.antennaweb.org and charting rotation angles for my exact location was very helpful here.

2. It takes forever between channel changes partly because the full program information is always displayed and partly because it takes a long time for the tuner to lock in.

3. Picture quality seems good so far. I have not noticed any difference between the TiVo and Samsung units here.

4. There is no coaxial digital output - only a single toslink. I convert the toslink to coax using a Midi CO2 and feed the PCM signal into a dCS Purcell/Delius setup.

5. Sound quality is much better with the TiVo unit (bigger, meatier, more up-front image) and there are no audio dropouts when listening to the MusicChoice channels. The Samsung suffered frequent audio dropouts on these channels.

6. There have, however, been audio dropout problems with HDNet. I recorded 15 minutes of an HDNet Sheryl Crow concert and there was one two-second audio dropout. The problem is well-documented and there may already be a software upgrade available to cure it.

7. Something I had not thought of, but seems obvious now, is that the unit eats up two LNB inputs since it has two DirecTV tuners. I had to run an additional line from the dish, which has a total of four feeds available thanks to an onboard multi-switch.

If you have questions let me know. I have not had a lot of time to play with the TiVo functions yet. I hope my wife will figure TiVo out and explain it to me.

Andy