15 thoughts on “I Give Up”

  1. I’m sure I don’t understand all uses of the word ‘farging’, but I believe my Yamaha RX-V1900 works correctly with HDMI…at least it meets my requirements.

  2. While I haven’t read the HDMI specs, one manufacturer of HDMI switches says its impossible to make an HDMI switch compatible with all devices. I suspect its a combination of a broken specification and devices which are out-of-compliance with the existing specs and just not enough interoperability testing.

    Audio is one area where things are really cocked up. You’d think it would be obvious that many users will want to plug all their source devices into their display and run an digital audio cable to an audio processor (“receiver”)–guess what, most of the time that’ll end up with stereo only going to the audio system.

    Sounds like you’ve run into the other scenario: plug all the source devices into the audio processor and run an HDMI cable to the display–some combinations of displays, sources, and HDMI switches (there must be one in the audio decoder in this scenario) simply don’t work.

    I’ve read that many of these problems come from problems with the EDID–the data which sink devices send to source devices specifying their audio and video capabilities. A receiver’s switch will obviously have to parse the EDID from the display they’re connected to and modify it (to reflect the audio capabilities of the receiver itself), and apparently that’s a little beyond the ability of some embedded systems programmers to do correctly. There are devices which you can interpose that allows you to simply replace the EDID with one of your choosing, to kluge around these compatibility problems. (search for hdmi edid minder or emulator).

    1. Well, I have a twenty-buck two-into-one HDMI switch that works just fine (which is what I was trying to replace with the new receiver, in addition to getting digital media capability). I don’t understand why they don’t seem to be able to take that switch and build it into a receiver. But the output from the receiver has the colors all washed out (and I had the same problem with a Pioneer I tried a couple months ago). The manual doesn’t have anything about it in the troubleshooting section — it only discusses what to do if there’s no picture at all. The closest thing that I see is if the HDMI output is “unstable” (whatever that means), in which case it says to turn off the “Deep Color” mode. But when I try to do that, it doesn’t work the way it says it should (hold down CBL/SAT button and then push the power/standby until it goes off, but it never goes off).

  3. ..although upon a closer read, they say that the Pioneer’s video performance is poor. They gave the Onkyo high marks for video processing, though.

  4. I run my $99 Panasonic receiver to my VIA 42″ LCD through the fiber optic digital audio cable. Then I have a PS3, Xbox360, and Toshiba laptop hooked up directly to the TV through the HDMI ports. I like it because I don’t have to mess with the receiver at all. When I switch the TV between sources it switches the audio stream from the respective device out to the receiver through the fiber.

    I leave the audio processor in auto surround mode and it automatically switches to whichever sound mode is being piped from the source. If I put a blueray or a game in the PS3 it goes into Dolby digital mode. If I put one of my DVD’s with 5.1 AC3 audio in, it goes into Prologic II 5.1 mode. If I go to over the air broadcast it switches into stereo mode but they encapsulate echo delays into the sound stream with can be picked up by the Prologic decoder and it simulates the surround sound.

    The Sunday night football on NBC broadcasts in full surround and I hear the crowd roaring out the rear channels and the announcers out of the center channel. I can even hear loud and clear when the parabolic mic picks up the rated-R language from the players out on the field. Although I get freaked out when someone in the stands at the game starts banging on something and I jump a bit thinking there is someone knocking on the front door, “Oh! Its the TV — Haha!”.

  5. You have a forty-year-old Marantz with HDMI inputs and outputs? I didn’t realize that Saul was so far ahead of his time.

    Yea I thought about that later. I never configure my hardware to use some of the fancy new stuff as the current generation of digital engineers have no idea how to deal with analog and at the frequencies of today’s modern video, it more resembles analog than they know.

  6. I have no problems with the HDMI 1.4 in my Onkyo 709, everything including 3D, works great.

    Now, the old Onkyo 707 blew an HDMI board (in warranty thank heavens) and cooked anything that was plugged into HDMI input #1.
    Ouch.

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