Path to HDTV 

Step 5 - The Arrival

Woo hoo! It's here!

I took the day off for the delivery since there's only one day out of the week that the Tweeter delivery folks come to my town. Most of the morning was spent in anticipation of it.

Calling them earlier in the week to schedule the time, I was told between 10 and 12. Being the worrywort that I am, I confirmed it this morning just after 10 to make sure I was still scheduled. Thankfully I was and was told that they'd be there no later than noon.

So let's step back in time a bit to check out how the room evolved.

The morning before, we had emptied out the rack under the TV. All that was really there was the Tivo unit. The other bays were for storage of some of the laserdisc box sets and some odds and ends.

The Tivo and Cable Box make their move to the top of the component rack on the left. Astute readers will note that my Dreamcast controller has a fuzzy green ball. Seaman has infected my life, much as Ataru Moroboshi infects others.

*sniffle* The rack and TV are now being loaned to my parents. I must stress that word as they seem to believe loan = theirs forever. 

The Tweeter folks arrived promptly at 11:20 in the morning and hauled the box around back and set it dead center where it needed to be. They hooked up the cable, s-video and all the other connections.

But unfortunately the component cables I bought over the weekend were two feet short. Extreme frustration ensued! A quick trip out to Tweeter though and the next 6.6 foot component cables were added. You know you're serious about home theater when you don't blink at spending 120$ on one set of cables.

The end result?

We queued up Romeo Must Die first to make sure the anamorphic aspect worked, and it did. Though we were struggling with it for a bit, as we didn't notice on the back of our Pioneer 414 player you have to manually toggle a switch for it to use the component cables instead of the S-video or standard RCA jacks. That was about 15 minutes of frustration there.

We started cycling through a few discs while on factory settings to see how things looked. Some looked great without any calibration (Saving Private Ryan, Wings of Honneamise, Sol Bianca: The Legacy) while some will definitely benefit from letting the set warm up about 100 hours and then calibrating.

Our initial impressions are very positive so far. Just in testing out Saving Private Ryan, we ended up watching the first 30 minutes and were simply amazed at the level of clarity and detail we were seeing the combat sequences. 

We're definitely looking forward to tweaking this bad boy out and spinning some serious discs. In the interim we'll be doing our usual reviews but will be omitting the video portion of it until we get it calibrated. It would be very unfair in my opinion to give it a rating while our equipment isn't properly tuned as our previous Toshiba 36" set was.

As always, questions will be answered in the hardware area in our forum.