First we cover the ins and outs of the FCC CableCard  mandate.  Then we review the Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player.  You can find some great deals on the Toshiba HD-DVD players right now, we'll let you know whether or not to take advantage of them.

 

The FCC and your Cable Box

On July 1st 2007 the FCC is mandating that cable operators stop deploying cable boxes with built in security features. This is being done so the consumer no longer has to lease a cable set top box in order to receive programming beyond that of basic cable. This ban has is genesis in the 1996 communications act that was designed to create a market that is based on competition. How many of our listeners have been paying a $10.00 a month lease fee for more than three years? At three years the consumer has spent $360 that could have gone into buying a STB. On paper this looks like a great idea but lets look into it a bit more.

Buy vs Lease - If you buy a STB and it breaks after warranty you are out of luck. You have to pay to fix it yourself. If your leased set top box has a malfunction you can always swap it out for a newer one. Likewise if the cable company upgrades the service with new technology you can get the latest box without a cost to you. However, its not like cable companies change technology every year. With competition you may be able to buy a cable box for a couple hundred dollars. In this case the box breaks even in two years or less. After that you can buy a new box if the technology changes. Some companies may create STB designs that can be field programmed to support future technology as well.

Still need a CableCard - So you go out and buy a third party STB and want to watch some Cable TV. You just plug it in and go right? Not so fast. You still need a CableCard to get on the cable system. Its not like the cable company will give them away. You still need to lease these devices. How much will they cost? Anywhere from $5 to $10. So in the end your are still shelling out money to get on the cable system. Maybe the exact amout as before.

What if I don't want to buy my own STB? - Well your cable company will have you covered here. They'll just lease you a STB with a cable card in it. They probably won't charge you more for the cable box and cable card...or will they. According to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association making the security features of the cable box a separate module will add anywhere between $75 to $90 to each box. But these numbers are suspect as they were quoting them back in 1998. By now costs should have come down. In any case, there will be an additional cost and that will be passed on to the consumer.

Who Wins? - Owners of TVs with Cable Card slots. This law may force faster adoption of cable cards and eliminate the need for set top boxes all together. Why dish out money to buy a cable box when you still have to lease a cable card. You might as well lease a cable card and plug it right into your TV. Satellit companies win too. They are exempt from this law. That's too bad though. We'd love to see what Tivo could do with DirecTV and Dish Network.

Let us know what you think!

 

 

Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD Player Review

You can find some great deals on the Toshiba HD-DVD players right now, especially the HD-A2 (Buy now).  They've had the 5 free movie promotion going for a while, and it seems like the price just keeps getting lower.  Is the player so bad that they need to practically give it away to get people to buy it?  Why would Toshiba go to such lengths to get these into your home theater?  The answer, of course, is the format war.  In the end, whoever can sell the most movies wins.  And for someone to buy or rent a movie, they have to have a player to watch it on.  If more people have HD-DVD players, more will buy HD-DVD movies and the rest will be history.

As far as the specs go, the HD-A2 supports:

• HD Output at 720p and 1080i
• SD Upconversion to 480p, 720p and 1080i
• High-performance SHARC DSP Audio processor
• Dolby Digital Plus 5.1ch
• Dolby TrueHD 5.1ch
• DTS HD (core only)
• Persistent storage
• HDMI
• Ethernet Port

It probably goes without saying that the pure audio visual experience with the HD-A2 is awesome.  We tested it on a JVC HD-61FH97 (Buy now) for video and ran it through a Denon AVR-3806 (Buy now) with Klipsch speakers for audio.  The player provides absolutely the best home theater experience we've had to date.  It was even better than Discovery HD Theater - which is hard to say, but completely true.  The picture quality is stunning and the audio is unbelievable.  We tried King Kong, Aeon Flux, Batman Begins, The Phantom of the Opera, The Entire Matrix Trilogy, you get the picture.  We just couldn't stop watching the thing.

The HD-A2 is the least capable of the current crop of HD-DVD players available from Toshiba.  Both of the other two models, the HD-A20 (Buy now) and the HD-XA2 (Buy now), support 1080p video.  In fact the HD-A20 is nearly identical to the HD-A2, it just adds 1080p for an extra $100 more on the MSRP.  So the odds that a firmware upgrade will ever be available for the HD-A2 to allow 1080p are pretty slim.  How would you explain that to someone who bought an HD-A20?  The HD-XA2 also comes with HDMI 1.3, better video processing, and gold plated input jacks.  But the HD-A2 is the one that's getting all the hot sale prices, so it appears to be the most popular right now.  But if you shop around, you might find a great deal on the HD-A20.  For example, right now it's only about $25 more than the HD-A2 at the HT Guys store (as of 6/22).

The audio is nothing short of amazing.  Perhaps it was just wishful listening, but we were blown away with how good the multi channel audio from the HDMI connection sounded.  Surround sound tracks have never been that immersive or detailed.  The player lacks multi channel analog outputs, so if you don't have an HDMI capable receiver you won't get the full listening experience.  That's another feature only available on the HD-XA2.  But if you love good audio, like we do, and you like to hear it loud, the HD-A2 doesn't disappoint.

So we've established that HD-DVD viewing is spectacular.  We aren't making any judgments about it versus Blu-ray or anything else, we're simply evaluating this player.  The next thing to check was up-conversion.  In that aspect it did very, very well.  It didn't get a perfect score on the HQV benchmark, but that should be fine.  It seemed to do a very solid job with the movies we watched.  In a very unscientific test, the OPPO 981 probably did a little better with the up-conversion, but they were very close.  All of the usual HT Guys test movies and test scenes came out very good, and they looked better using the up-conversion on the HD-A2 than not using it.  As an up-converting DVD player it scores near the top of the players we've seen.

The player is a little slow to boot up, but not that bad.  And while movies look and sound great, the menus seem to be a bit sluggish.  In fact our that's really our only complaint about the player itself.  The setup and configuration menus are easy to use and understand and actually respond very well and firmware updates are very simple (if you have an Ethernet connection handy).  The only problem was with the interactive menus on the discs themselves.  For example, sometimes scrolling through the chapter selection would get a little behind the remote clicks, so even after you stopped clicking the menus would continue to move, making it very difficult to stop on the chapter you really wanted.  It was almost like spinning the big wheel on the Price is Right.  But once our patience kicked in, we were able to master the menus like pros.

Overall the HD-A2 is a great way to jump into the next generation DVD game.  It's only $100 more than the Xbox 360 add on drive (or even less if you're watching the sale prices) and will always be a very good up-converting DVD player, even if the HD-DVD format eventually goes away or merges somehow into a consolidated format.  The audio and video quality are amazing.  If you like watching Discovery HD Theater simply because it looks so darn good, you've got to get an HD-DVD player.