SACD was released in 1999 with DVD-Audio following in 2000, both systems are fairly similar in the fact they offer multi channel audio compared to CDs two channels. Both systems also incorporate a copy protection system to stop users burning copies of their record collection for friends, this copy protection is often criticized by users as the reason why record companies are keen to push the superior audio quality of the systems.

For many people the quality of these new formats are not noticeable when compared to CD and the record companies won’t see the rush of people running out to buy new SACD or DVD-Audio collections like they did when CD was released.

The first players that were released were very expensive, with only the true audiophiles jumping on board. SACD players at first could also play standard CDs as well, while DVD-Audio players could play CD and DVD – video. Today there are players on the marker that are rather cheap that play both DVD-Audio and Video, SACD and CDs. This backward compatibility along with the reduction of player price may be the saving grace of both formats.

The discs themselves are also backward compatible to some degree with the majority of SACD disc having a hybrid CD layer so they can be played in a normal CD player. Many DVD-Audio discs on the other hand include a Dolby Digital or even DTS track so they can be played on a standard DVD Video player but not in a CD player.

If you long for better quality than CD a DVD-Audio and SACD combo player would be the shot to go with your decent surround sound setup, you could even start building you collection of hybrid SACDs before you purchase your player. If on the other hand you think your MP3 collection is just as good as your CD collections quality then you probably won’t notice the performance enhancements of a SACD or DVD-Audio system

Digital television is like a new format of television transmission. Traditionally all TV’s used an analogue format of TV transmission, it didn’t matter if your were in the USA and using a NTSC set or in Australia using a PAL standard set it was all analogue.

Introducing digital television solves a few problems associated with analogue TV and also opens up a few extra marketing opportunities for broadcasters, equipment manufacturers and governments.

Analogue TV’s limitations are starting to show their age as more and more broadcasters want to transmit, it is getting difficult to allow them to set up new transmitters in some countries and not have their transmitter interfere with one from a neighboring town. Allegedly digital TV transmission doesn’t have these problems like analogue had, also with digital TV the video information is compressed so in the bandwidth space it took to transmit one channel before you can now transmit several channels.

With all these extra channels broadcasters can now transmit a lot more stuff like TV guides, extra programming multiple sport views and high definition programming, thus giving the TV stations more advertising revenue and the user more choice.

Not every country has committed to digital TV yet and just like the days of analogue TV there seems that no country can agree on a standard system with Europe adopting a system known as DVB, the US using the ATSC system and Japan using the ISDB system.

All these systems are capable of both standard and high definition pictures, standard definition is rated at around 640 by 480 pixels where high definition is more like 1920 × 1080 or so. Standard definition is often compared to DVD quality, this is a pretty good comparison as its around the same size picture and the technology used to encode and the image into digital is pretty much the same as what DVD uses.

Some countries are proposing the total phase our of analogue TV altogether, while digital set top boxes can be purchased reasonably cheap to keep your old analogue set going, the idea is pretty impractical for the millions of hand held sets around the world.

TiVo was first launched in 1999, there have been other companies that have released similar products but TiVo has by far remained the most popular. A TiVo box is essentially a scaled down computer with a hard disk inside running TiVo’s own version of Linux. The idea behind the service is you connect this box to your TV and to your phone line or internet connection and the box will download your local program guide to your box for a service fee. Once you box is updated with the latest program guide you can select what programs you want to watch and the Tivo box does the rest. You can even pause and rewind live TV thanks to the box always recording a buffer of TV.

With TiVo’s popularity this has encouraged several user groups to develop hacks for the TiVo boxes, as the TiVo service was originally only available to the US, UK, Canada and Taiwan, several user groups have been buying up Series 1 Tivo boxes off eBay and modifying them to work in other countries, they have even reverse engineered the TV guides writing their own versions for their unofficial TiVo boxes to download.

The DIY bug has also inspired other groups to produce versions of PVR software like Myth TV for Linux and Media Portal for Windows that clone the functionality of TiVo’s idea and more. Microsoft themselves have even produced a PVR version of XP called Media Centre that lets you set and forget you TV recordings from a nice interface just like a TiVo box.

Many people blame dirty heads for every problem their video has from tapes not ejecting to channels not tuned! the only thing head cleaning can fix is poor playback and tracking quality (some units display a blue screen when they cant track the tape).

The first thing to do when attempting manual cleaning is to unplug the VCR and take the lid off. make sure you unplug the power as there are many high voltages in a VCR and you don’t want to get fried. Next identify the head drum it is the large shinny silver (sometimes gold) drum that sits in front of where a loaded tape would be. On the bottom of the drum would be two to sometimes four or 6 small black chips about the size of a flat match, these are the heads and are extremely fragile. do not poke them or touch them with anything sharp etc as they are fragile and expensive. if a head gets broken you would have to buy a new head drum and this is very expensive, we know we have repeated ourselves a bit here but we wanted to point out how fragile the heads can be.

To clean by hand, you will need what are called ‘head cleaning sticks’. These are covered by a type of chamois and are safe to use if used properly, some people also use paper but great care must be taken. Firstly moisten the cleaning stick with head cleaner which is probably just pure isopropyl alcohol then place the flat chamois part next to the head drum, Do not rub the stick on the drum you may break a head off. With the moist stick against the drum you should be able to move the drum around as they normally will spin freely. After a couple of revolutions of the drum you can take the stick away and you may not some dirt is now on the stick. when using isopropyl alcohol you will need to leave the unit sit for a few minuets before reassembly and testing, to allow any excess moisture to evaporate. one final point is never use cotton buds (q-tips) to clean the heads as the fluff from the cotton bud will catch on the head either damaging the head or making the picture worse and never tip the alcohol directly on the mechanism.

Symptoms of dirty heads include loss of treble, muffled sound, low volume and sometimes chewed tapes. To clean heads professionally you can forget about head cleaning tapes, these are good as a preventative measure only and may not clean away some of the caked on oxide that can accumulate on your heads.

First we need to do a visual inspection, 90% of units will have good access to the deck, if you open the door and look inside you will notice two or three things. in the middle there is a metal box with a rectangular strip on it this is the playback and record head, (if you unit does record) there will be a similar box on the left, this is the erase head and on the right is a rubber wheel below a shaft this is the pinch roller and capstan.

If there are any signs of brown oxide on the head or pinch roller its time to clean it up. some cassette doors will clip off to give you better access take a look at the side of the door when its open if it looks like it is a two piece door try to gently unclip by lifting upwards, if you cant unclip don’t worry about it as you don’t want to force it and maybe break it. next use some alcohol or maybe Mentholated Spirits on a rag or cotton bud to clean the head and pinch roller. never use any thing sharp or hard near the head if the oxide is caked on the head use a soft cream polish like silvo or brasso, never use steel wool. leave sit to allow pinch roller to dry out, then test. You should now hear an improvement in audio quality, most notably an improvement in the treble range.

If it looks like a new CD and is not a recordable CD (some players don’t like recordable CDs) then this is the CD we will use for test. Put it in the player most players should read the table of contents (toc) within 2 to 3 seconds, now press play. Did the player take a long time to play track one and is it skipping? now try the last track, it too should play within a few seconds and not skip.

If your unit failed any of these tests it maybe time to clean the lens. CD lens cleaners do work in 50% of cases but if its too dirty, cleaning it manually is the only way to go. If your unit is a multi disk unit or 3 in one I recommend trying the CD cleaner as access to the CD lens in one of these type of units ranges from difficult to impossible and best left to the experts. Other home component type units are often easy to work on sometimes with only 4 screws needing to be removed. Firstly unplug the unit unscrew the top and remove, you should see the CD deck in the unit take a look for a black box with a blue lens (it maybe under the CD clamper) this what you want to clean.

You will need cotton buds and I recommend isopropyl alcohol, never use turps, thinners or anything sharp. All it takes is a quick twirl of the cotton bud and perhaps a quick go of the dry end to clean away any excess alcohol. If the lens is dusty or cloudy this should have fixed your skipping problems (smokers unit often suffer from a cloudy CD lens) try out your CD again if the problem persists, it maybe time to take it for repair or remembering laser replacement may be more expensive than a new unit perhaps its time you purchased a new CD or DVD player, you can check out a few of our recommendations below.

At the heart of every DLP projection system is an optical semiconductor known as the Digital Micromirror Device, or DMD chip, which was invented by Dr. Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instruments in 1987.

The DMD chip is probably the world’s most sophisticated light switch. It contains a rectangular array of up to 1.3 million hinge-mounted microscopic mirrors; each of these micromirrors measures less than one-fifth the width of a human hair.

When a DMD chip is coordinated with a digital video or graphic signal, a light source, and a projection lens, its mirrors can reflect an all-digital image onto a screen or other surface. The DMD and the sophisticated electronics that surround it are what we call Digital Light Processing technology

A DMD panel’s micromirrors are mounted on tiny hinges that enable them to tilt either toward the light source in a DLP projection system (ON) or away from it (OFF)-creating a light or dark pixel on the projection surface.

The bit-streamed image code entering the semiconductor directs each mirror to switch on and off up to several thousand times per second. When a mirror is switched on more frequently than off, it reflects a light gray pixel; a mirror that’s switched off more frequently reflects a darker gray pixel.

In this way, the mirrors in a DLP projection system can reflect pixels in up to 1,024 shades of gray to convert the video or graphic signal entering the DMD into a highly detailed grayscale image.

The white light generated by the lamp in a DLP projection system passes through a color wheel as it travels to the surface of the DMD panel. The color wheel filters the light into red, green, and blue, from which a single-chip DLP projection system can create at least 16.7 million colors. And the 3-DMD chip system found in DLP Cinema projection systems is capable of producing no fewer than 35 trillion colors.

The on and off states of each micromirror are coordinated with these three basic building blocks of color. For example, a mirror responsible for projecting a purple pixel will only reflect red and blue light to the projection surface; our eyes then blend these rapidly alternating flashes to see the intended hue in a projected image.

Televisions, home theater systems and business projectors using DLP technology rely on a single DMD chip configuration like the one described above.

White light passes through a color wheel filter, causing red, green and blue light to be shone in sequence on the surface of the DMD. The switching of the mirrors, and the proportion of time they are ‘on’ or ‘off’ is coordinated according to the color shining on them. The human visual system integrates the sequential color and sees a full-color image.

DLP technology-enabled projectors for very high image quality or high brightness applications such as cinema and large venue displays rely on a 3-DMD-chip configuration to produce stunning images, whether moving or still.

In a 3-chip system, the white light generated by the lamp passes through a prism that divides it into red, green and blue. Each DMD chip is dedicated to one of these three colors; the colored light that the micromirrors reflect is then combined and passed through the projection lens to form an image.

Dolby AC-3 was the name used for Dolby Digital prior to the late 1990s. It was designed as a versatile low bit ratecoder for’ Multchannel Digital Audio System’. Today AC-3 generally refers to sound system used on some laserdisc players produced prior to the advent of DVD. Although technically the same audio system, Laserdiscs used an AC-3 RF output that required the use of an amplifier with a AC-3 RF in or a converter to convert the RF signal to the more common SP-DIF format used today. The AC-3 RF output was purely digital RF audio output, the signal has to be decoded by a RF to digital decoder before it can be connected to the digital input of a Dolby Digital Amplifier. It was mostly older high end amplifiers that had a RF decoder input built in to the amplifier but now that laserdisc is a superseded format most high end amps sold today do away with the AC3 RF input in favor of more SP-DIF sockets used by DVD, set top boxes and bluray players.

The next version of Dolby Digital to come along was Dolby Digital EX. It extended the standard 5.1 channel Dolby Digital codec by matrixed rear channels, creating 6.1 or 7.1 channel output in a similar way to how prologic added surround channels to a stero sound track.

The latest version of Dolby Digital you may come across is Dolby TrueHD. Invented as a lossless audio codec it is was developed for the HD-DVD or Blu ray market and is a direct competitor to DTS-HD. It is a 7.1 channel system derived from 8 discretely recorded tracks. Dolby Digital Plus can also be found on Blu Ray or HD-DVD, it is similar in the fact that it is has 7.1 channels but it is considered a lossy audio format being derived from Dolby Digital. It would probably only be used on discs where there was not enough space to fit the TrueHD format.

The general rule of thumb is that if you buy an amp that supports the latest version of an audio format is that it will also support the earlier versions. If you have no intentions of buying a blu ray player and are quite happy with your 5.1 DVDs then there would be no need to upgrade from a Dolby Digital to a TrueHD amp as none of your media will be able to take advantage of the extra features of your new amp.

The primary difference between the consumer formats of Dolby Surround and of Dolby Surround Pro Logic is that Dolby Surround uses three channels (Left, Right and Surround), while Pro Logic uses four channels (Left, Right, Surround and Centre). With the addition of the Centre channel, the distribution of sound elements becomes clearer In addition, by installing the adaptive matrix circuit into the playback side, Pro Logic emphasises the sound directions.

Dolby Pro Logic is a totally analogue format, the advantages are a Pro Logic amp can take the stereo sound from any stereo input and decode the pro logic encoding in the stereo sound track. Pro Logic has since been superseded by Dolby Digital, a superior sound format that is mainly found on DVDs, fortunately nearly all Dolby Digital amps are backward compatible with Pro Logic and therefore your VCR and TVs sound output.

Apart from the superior sound quality you will find on Dolby Digital the main difference you will notice is the need to connect a digital cable from you DVD player to your Dolby Digital amp. Pro Logic didn’t need this extra cable as being an analogue format the surround audio was matrixed on top of the standard left and right audio channels.

In case you move town, buy a new video recorder or a new channel starts broadcasting you may need to adjust your tuning. Every country has a different range of TV bands and channels for example the UK only use the UHF band while Australia and New Zealand use VLF, VHF and UHF. Tuning the channels in should be similar across all countries. Bearing this in mind we are trying to present this info to suit all audiences and can only give a general overview of how to tune in your set. We hope the info is of help and for this example we are going to tune in the UHF channel 31 but the same principals can be applied to any channel.

Push Button Tuning

If your TV set has ‘push buttons’ and is about 20 or so years old you will find a group of wheels and selectors under the tuning door and you will need to follow these instructions:

Switch off the AFT (Automatic Fine Tuner). Sometimes this is done automatically when the tuning door is opened.
Push the button on which you want channel 31 to appear. (don’t use a button you currently use for another channel or your video) Open your TV tuning door. This will reveal a series of selectors and tuning wheels. Each selector and its adjacent tuning wheel is associated with a tuning button on the front of the TV. For example, the third tuning button is connected to the third selector switch and the third tuning wheel.

As channel 31 is on the UHF Band you will need to set the selector switch to UHF if your set is capable of tuning multiple bands (ie: you may not have this selector in the UK). Labelling of these channel ranges varies from brand to brand, but UHF is usually U, UHF, C, or 3. the other 2 spots will be VL and VH or A and B etc.

Turn the corresponding tuning wheel slowly clockwise until the channel 31 appears on the TV screen or until the little pointer indicates you have reached the end of the tuning range. If channel 31 does not appear, then begin turning the tuning wheel anti-clockwise until Channel 31 is found. Perhaps there are other channels in your area on the UHF band (lets say channel 28) if you find this one you are getting close so keep trying either side. It generally takes about twenty turns of the tuning wheel to cover the range of band selected. When the desired channel appears on the TV screen, adjust the tuning wheel for the best picture and sound. Turn on the AFT and close the tuning drawer (or door).

More Modern Sets

Every set built in the past 15 or so years seems to have a different way of tuning in the channels with the tuning via an on screen display, if you can find your TV instruction manual try and follow it carefully most have an automatic tuning mode which it will want to default to when first entering the tuning mode. Automatic tuning is good if you cant figure out your tuning but the problem is it will not put the channels under their desired channels numbers. Some set are terrible to tune even stumping the most experienced TV technician, while others are simple. TV sets don’t detune themselves so if it ain’t broke don’t try and fix it, your fuzzy picture may be due to another reason, like your VCR, cables or antenna.

Still got problems

Ask your neighbors, perhaps you are not in the optimum area for the channel you are tuning, ask a neighbor with a similar looking antenna what his picture is like.

Do you have the correct antenna? In Australia Several older homes do not have UHF antennas as there was not UHF transmissions prior to the 70s, if so you will need to get your antenna checked as you wont be able to receive UHF channels.

Does your TV only have one rotary control with no U position? Your TV is probably unable to receive UHF as several older Australian sets were not built for UHF, If you have a VCR you should be able to tune this into receive UHF channels.