Home Theater Set up questions, extra equipment needed?

[phatrat1982]

Ok here is what I have currently a 42" 1080p LCD from Philips, and a 32" 720p LCD from Samsung. The bigger set is in the living room the smaller set the bedroom. I have a Blu Ray Player with HDMI, a WDTV HD Media Player with HDMI and several 500GB HDD, and an HD-DVD Player with Component because the third HDMI is reserved for Directv. I have 1 more HDMI port on the TV, but I am short on cables at the moment. I have everything on the Samsung hooked up using component for the same reason.

On the Samsung I have a Philips upconverting dvd player that also supports divx and has USB, which I use the same HDD's to play back video as I do the WDTV thingy. I also have Directv on that set.

In the guest bedroom a 27" CRT Sony 4080i/1080i set with ATSC tuner. The Sony set only has Component, S-Video, and composite video inputs.

Now the question I have is two fold kinda sorta.


First, I have a Magnavox Laser Disc player, which has Digital Audio out, S-Video out and that's the best it can do. My question is what TV set would yield the best picture quality for the Laser Disc player?


Second question is what additional equipment, cables, etc do I need to improve the PQ of the LD player?



I read an article a while back when HDTV's were brand new, no I didn't read the article then it was written then but I just read it, and it talked about all kinds of extra boxes and cables and converters and other shit to get a good picture out of the LD on the digital HDTV sets.


The guy at Best Buy told me it should be best to just use the Coax cables because the tuner on the TV will scale that accordingly as it is a analog input it will not convert to digital and that would remove the digital scaling artifacts or something like that. Now I haven't tested this yet even with our VCR or anything except before when we just got the Samsung a year ago and it was the best Tv we had, it did a decent job with the analog channels over the air but we never tested the coax input with anything else like the VCR or the LD. I guess that must all be very confusing right?

[HAMP]

right.

[KASR]

Originally Posted by phatrat1982

First, I have a Magnavox Laser Disc player, which has Digital Audio out, S-Video out and that's the best it can do. My question is what TV set would yield the best picture quality for the Laser Disc player?


Second question is what additional equipment, cables, etc do I need to improve the PQ of the LD player?

I would follow the standard of whichever connections yields the best quality: composite > component > HDMI/DVI

It would also help us to know the model number of the Magnavox LDP - or a picture of the rear connections.

[phatrat1982]

It has composite video and VHF coax outputs. It has Analog and digital audio out, the digital audio out is the coaxial orange cable that goes to a receiver like modern DVD players have. The


I understand the chain of connections but i also thought going from an analog source to a digital display complicated things. It was my understanding that the old analog tv's scaled analog picture better than a digital tv would. If that is correct then what I am wanting to do is get as clean of a picture as possible without the digital scaling artifacts. Does that make sense?


The model number of the Magnavox player is CDV 484, but I don't know how helpful that will be I never could find any useful information about the player online.

I understand it will never look as good as blu ray or even DVD for the most part, but I would like to get the best picture quality out of this player as possible since I do have some movies on LD that I am not likely to upgrade anytime soon.

I was looking for some advice is all. I'd rather not "experiment" too much because the new LCD tv's I have cost more money than I can afford to replace so I would prefer not to mess them up too much.

[phatrat1982]

Looks like I am just going to do some more research elsewhere. Thanks for the replies.