not my area of expertise

Sitting here in the office with a bad cold (still) when nice Mrs Attrick
rings up from the top end of the village.
"I have telephoned to throw myself on your mercy!" she started,
dramatically.
"Super," I replied, "I like it when maidens throw themselves on my mercy!"
"Ohh tee hee!"
"What's up then?"
"Ohh the ruddy satellite man's been!"
"Say n'more."
"We had HD, but we've got nothing! He's left us with nothing!"
"What, took the furniture?"
"Oh give over you. No, we've no telly. Nothing!"
"Took the telly did he?"
"No look, Bill, stop it you bugger, you know what I mean!"
"Got a blue screen?"
"No, nothing."
"Look, I've got a terrible cold. If I come round you'll mebbe catch it, and
that won't be good for you will it?" She has an illness where any viral
infection can be really serious.
"Oh God!" This appeal worked, and she had an idea straight away. "I'll go in
the conservatory with the boys" (the scotty dogs) "and we'll shout through
the glass."
"OK, if you're sure. See you in a minute or two then."

In the lounge was a massive Sony Bravia, a Sky HD box, an old Sony surround
sound device, and a VCR. Luckily the lounge, dining room, and conservatory
are in a straight line, so we could communicate, albeit with some
difficulty. Hubby had retreated into the conservatory as well. The boys
woofed at me half heartedly.

It turned out that they had used the old Sky box for everything except to
play tapes back. The telly had never been connected to the aerial. The TV
must have been scarted to the telly because all they knew was that when they
had turned the Sky box on the had telly displayed the satellite channel. But
now, nothing. They'd been on the phone to Sky half the afternoon and had got
nowhere. Of course there was now no scart cable, just an HDMI. Selecting AV5
on the telly brought up a picture but no sound. I could find no way of
making the telly switch automatically to either of the two HDMI inputs, nor
would it come on to either of them automatically. Is there something I don't
know? I should mention that I am a bit out of touch with this sort of thing,
having done very little but commercial RF systems for years now. But was
progress of a kind. The satellite man had apparently not mentioned the need
to select AV5.

Turning the volume up did nowt, so I had a browse in the menus and found
that the internal speakers were turned off. I said, "Do you normally use
that surround sound thing?"
"Yes, but it won't work now, in fact there's no sound at all!"
"So did the sound work when the satellite man was here?"
"No, he couldn't make it work, so he put a new dish up but it still didn't
work."
"Oh come on, you aren't saying he put a new dish up to make the sound work?"
"Well no, not exactly, he rung someone up about the sound, and he was
waiting for them to come back to him, so he said he might as well do the
dish. But I guess they never rung him, because in the end he said he'd come
back on Thursday and sort the sound out."
I tried the speaker on/off control and it worked, but they wanted the
surround sound to work, so I left the speakers off and had another look at
the munus. The surround sound was connected to the telly via the telly's AV2
scart. It proved to be possible to route any of the AV inputs to AV2 except
the HDMI ones. Again, is there something I don't know?

I wondered if an optical connection would be the answer, but in the end I
simply connected the surround sound's input directly to the Skybox's scart
1. I fully expected some sort of problem, most likely lip sync, but it
seemed perfectly OK.

I walked round the back and had a look at the dish. It looked OK, all
obviously brand new, even the wall bracket. I remembered that when their son
lived at home he'd had his own Skybox, so the LNB must have been a quad
anyway. So why the dish had been changed I don't know.

Since the VCR was now obsolete and since the TV was only used in conjunction
with the Skybox, I seemed to have found a fix. Neverthelesss, I was left
with a feeling that maybe I should have found a more elegant solution.

Bill


.

Relevant Pages

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