Subject says it all, almost. My 85YO half-blind father wants to upgrade his bedroom TV, which he uses several hours per day. But it need to have inputs for his old composite-feed VCR, DVD, and Dish box. DTV from antenna won't play nice being fed through old SD dish box, so I want the reserve the F connector for the roof antenna. (no dish locals around here). I'd strongly prefer for him to not have to do any voodoo of switching stuff on and off in a certain order, so I'd rather not use the dish RF output anyway- just hit the source button to switch back and forth. I'd rather not use a mechanical switch box, but that is the fallback, since he has to stand in front of the stack to put in a tape or DVD anyway. He won't let me just replace it all with modern stuff that uses HDMI cables- the old stuff still works.
-- aem sends, trying to finish all the list before I go home and can have a real Usenet connection again, in 4 days....
No, actually they don't, especially at entry-level price points. Several HDMI, but usually only a single old-style composite video. He had the urge to buy this morning bright and early, and after the clueless blue-crew droid at Sears pissed him off, we went across the street to Best Buy. He was about to pull the trigger on a Samsung 32", when the Samsung 40" piled up in the aisle caught his eye. Only one composite input, so we had to go with a switch box. BestBuy being BestBuy, their cable prices were of course outrageus, so I went elsewhere for those. Composite cables are getting hard to find, and impossible in the 18" jumper cable size you need for a stack of equipment. Ended up with 6-footers from Home Depot. Radio Shack was useless- 'you've got questions- we've got blank stares'- they only had long cables, more expensive than BestBuy.
But even with old SD feeds, it looks sweet. Should be much easier on what little is left of his eyes. So he now not only has a nicer computer/internet connection than me, he has a nicer TV. Too bad I'm too cheap to go out and buy one for me....
-- aem sends, stuck on Google till Weds morning when I get on the plane and return to the frozen north.... (Too bad I don't have any way to haul some of the grapefruit from the tree out front back with me...)
I still get component and composite mixed up, even though I have one and not the other. The mnemomic I made up and was using turned out to be wrong. :)
That's enough to drive anyone crazy. Although they do have remote controls that can learn macros, and do several things in a row iiuc from one button.
There are two but only two remote controlled A-B switches that I could find. One is at Radio Shack and has a remote and also an A-B button on top. The other was on the net, had no button on top, but they sold an additional remote for it separately.
Absolutely. The old stuff still works. You're lucky he's willing to get a bigger tv!
You can also try sci.electronics.repair. Many of the technical electronics answers are way above my head, and a couple don't like non-repair questions or simple questions, but others are quite helpful. For one thing I'm thinking there might be a box which would take some of your inputs and do the switching necessary, like an A-B switch but more powerful. I don't know how the prices of these boxes compare with the price of a fancier tv.
When I was in my 20's I had (sound only) a reel-to-reel, a cassette, and something else all going into one set of RCA inputs of a simple but nice AM-FM stereo radio, via 3-input selection switches, one for the left channel and one for the right. I didn't know there were such switches until I saw them at a surplus store, and they were cheap, but later I realized they were soldered/assembled wrong and the switches didn't point to the device selected, which is why they were surplus and why they were cheap. I still have them.
This was in the living room of the fifth-floor apartment, and I ran wires out the window to speakers in the kitchen, and also my bedroom, where I had an outboard amplifier, assembled on a scrap piece of metal
2x4 from an old kit someone gave me, and from there to the bathroom, where I had a volume control glued to the toilet, and also reachable from the bathtub. And a 10 or 12" woofer and tweeter from a 1930's record player in the corner between the wall and ceiling of the bathroom. Great sound. The speakers got moved to my house now. They're about 75 years old and sound very good.
The grill cloth (decorative burlap actually) is water-stained from the steam we talked about in another thread. I will replace the grill cloth eventually but connnecting the speaker wires, then nailing the molding up there while holding the speakers up with the other hand, with a ladder too nearly vertical because it was in the bathtub was hard enough 27 years ago
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