I had a perfect example this evening of how we are getting more stupid.   Or maybe its just me, in fact thinking about it, it probably is just me.   I have often reflected on how, if I was somehow transported back in time to occupy my own body twenty years ago I would be totally lost.  I was doing a fairly technical job and doing it very well, but I realise now that I can’t remember any of the details of it now.  It would take me weeks to re-learn how to do things I was doing as a matter of routine.Tonight was something simpler, but in a much shorter time frame.  My new DVD/SACD player arrived today.  I had to go out to a Crawley Campaign Against Racism meeting, but decided I had enough time to set it all up and test it before going out.  Big mistake.

OK, so I did wire it up and eventually got it all going and I did test it, but only by putting in a DVD for long enough to be satisfied that I had both picture and sound, and then by putting in a region one DVD and getting the menu of it so I could be certain it was modified to be multi-region, and then putting in an SACD to be certain it got detected and played properly in all 6 channels.  I didn’t have enough time to actually leave any dics in long enough to enjoy them.

A casual reader might be wondering why all the fuss.  Surely you just plug in the SCART cable and off you go?   In most cases that would be true, but I was replacing an old player that was set up by me during the few weeks that I more or less understood home cinema several years ago.

There is no SCART cable involved at all.   Instead there are ten separate cables leading from the DVD player to the TV and amplifier.  For some reason I thought, at the time, that this was a better solution.  So I have all six surround channels going through individual interconnects to the amplifier, plus a redundant link taking the digital sound output so that I can choose between having Dolby and DTS decoded in the DVD player or in the amp.  The picture goes through three cables to the component video input of the TV.

There is nothing carrying sound from the DVD player to the TV.  Even if I am just watching a box set of a TV series it has to be listened to through the amp.  Again, I must have thought this was a good idea at the time.

Just plugging all the right cables into the right place isn’t good enough though.  The TV is set up to get a progressive scan signal from the DVD player, but when you take it out of the box it defaults to an interlaced signal.  You can easily set that using the DVD’s menu – but of course you can’t actually see it.  I had to set the thing up to play through s-video just to change the settings, and then change cables back again to use them.

I spent half the evening cursing my younger self for doing everything the hard way and the other half amazed that I ever worked it out in the first place.

I can vaguely remember something about SACD only working if you used the 5.1 outputs and if you only used the coaxial output you only get stereo so that has some justification, but I’m not sure about the video output.  I must have read something about the picture being better using progressive scan and kidded myself I would be able to tell the difference.