Why no TV tweaks

Almost every other item in the AV chain can be improved by upgrading various weaknesses such as power supplies but why is there no mention of upgrades for TV's

 

A good upgrade for TV is a brick - surprisingly black blacks and no problems with naff programming then:


Seriously though, decent mains cables can help VHS machines and the like, though to be honest I don't bother in my AV rig - the only stuff I've upgraded is the SCART leads (and audio interconnects of course )

 

Upgrading my scart cable from my Philips digital to reciever to my TV made a huge difference. I bought some odd unkown lead but it is very very good quality and has proper radio waves sheilding.

Of course another great upgrade is to have the TV sound coming from your HIFI system like I do.

 

Aside from external tweaks such as cables etc I cannot find anything to improve the internal workings of a TV

 

You can't really though as TVs are quite a bit more complex than HIFI stuff. You may be able to improve the power supply to make it more stable which should give a sharper image however this would be an extremely dangerous thing to considering a modern colour TV has in exess of 10,000 volts.

Ultimatly the picture quality comes down to high accurate the gun is shined onto the tube, the flatter the screen the faster it has to be. Old tubes were round because the guns could not reach the far ends fast enough within the refresh time.

I can't remember what the timing circuit is called now but this can probably be upgraded if you knew what you were doing.

The modulator could be upgraded but I would imagine most decent TVs should already come with a very good quality one.

 

The reason for asking comes from some conversations with a few engineers. I have had problems with the last 4 TV's since Nov 03. What they have said is that modern TV's are very sensitive to noise and this is what causes a lot of problems with the picture quality.

Therefore my logic goes something like this:

Improve the powersupply and cut down the introduced distortion into the set. The turner, I imagine is made of cheap standard parts which might react well to upgrading.

I accept there is little to be done to improve the mechanics of the tube and associated parts. But everthing else cannot be beyond the wit of man - can it?

 

Apparently it's more in the order of 34,000 volts! That's what the chap told me who repaired my TV recently. He also mentioned that the power supply/transformer has to supply a variety of different voltages to different bits of the TV so it's all pretty complex.

The picture quality of decent modern sets should be pretty spot on. You can always try a different tuner of course with all the Freeview boxes around these days.

Use decent SCART and/or s-video leads and get decent quality ariel cable too - I believe QED now do ariel cable.

Sound wise - the best bet of course is to NOT use the TV to produce the sound but the instead use a hifi or av system.

Matt.

 

I have found aerial boosters can provide a more 'solid' picture but there are fors and against with these.

However, the best tip I give to people is to keep your aerial cables as short as possible. Many times have I been able to cure a fuzzy picture by taking a stanley knife to a friends aerial cable and removing the 15m coil of cable tucked round the back.

Sometimes running a separate signal feed to the TV and Video helps too.

 

You'd be wrong; my 1997 Sony is awful on RF signals - noisy and grainy - totally UN-Trinitron like; my housemate's Mitsubishi widescreen is similar.

Freeview/Sky are all well and good for areas that can receive them and/or are allowed dishes...

I wish us Brits had got into colour telly earlier - those old "roundie" colour tellies from the 50s and 60s in the States were well cool!

PS - that telly above is my sister's 1984 Pye. It went "off" one day when she'd thrown it out (in GWO) and it had been in my kitchen. I got the demolition crew (my mate Robbie Dee) in to finish it off with a breezeblock.

 

Your time will come Dom - the BBC are planning to switch analogue off in 2007 so one would presume the whole country will have to be covered by Freeview by then.

As for your Sony, that doesn't sound too good - did it look okay in the shop? If it was/is that bad, couldn't you have taken it back?

Matt.

 

Do you think they'll actually do it that soon? I hope not, and suspect it'll probably be a good while longer really, since although more people are coming round to going digital for their main TV, I doubt many people are yet prepared to shell out for all their other TVs round the house. I don't have digital at all yet, and am not desperate to at all...

Four/five channels is quite enough for me, I barely manage to keep up with the few series I do try and watch. Last night I watched the recent documentary on the invention of the TV that Jeremy Clarkson did, and was horrified by the figures at the end about average TV viewing. It was something like five hours per day for adults (possibly in the US but I can't be sure).

 

i think you may well ask why no radio tweaks as well. is it because you have little control over the source signal - i.e. the broadcast so it;s not worth making any other adjustments? i.e. you can;t make a silk purse out of a sows ear. or in audio parlance - source first.

cheers


julian

 

I would just recommended get a Loewe and stop worrying.

 

Ah - it was ex dem, and compared to other tellies isn't any worse; with my eyesight I sit VERY close so any problems show up. The Sony's biggest failing (bearing in mind the quality of a Trinitron tube) is the lack of comb filter.

On SKy in the old house, and on RGB DVD it's tip top. It's just many Sony tellies (including all the portables I've owned) seem to suck on RF.

 

According to this:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1148197,00.html

...the answer is "yes".

Matt.

 

Not quite true... There's not so much audio(phile) related tweaking that goes on with tuners, but there are certainly a band of DIYers who love tweaking and optimising the RF performance of their tuners. So called "DX" enthusiasts, also known sometimes as "DXers", or people could be compared to train-spotters armed with tuners and big Ron Smith like aerial rigs instead of clipboards and notepads, and who enjoy pulling in and finding distant broadcasts/radio stations - the further afield they can pick up the bigger the frill.

The filters and IF stages in the RF decoder stages of a tuner are prime examples areas of DIY tweakery which are often looked at by a DXer wanting to improve or squeeze out better sensitivity (the ability to pull in weak signals) and selectivity (the ability to discriminate tightly packed adjacent stations from one another) from their tuners.

http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/DIY.html

 

You seem to know a hell of a lot about them

Michael.

 

Michael,

I use to be quite an avid FM DXer , not that I'd ever heard of the term until I recently started researching some tuner stuff years later on to find a load of other people who'd set-up websites devoted to this very activity.

Now that I live in an area where there are next to no FM radio stations to pick up, not even if I had a huge aerial rig to do so, that once part of my life is now but a "distant" memory.

 

There are a few simple tweaks that will give better picture quality on most modern sets.

The reason these tweaks work is because most TVs are set up with factory defaults to make the picture look as bright, colourful, contrasty and artificially sharp as possible in case the TV is displayed against other brands at a shop.

These are all basic picture control tweaks, so there's nothing dangerous going on. In most cases we're going to back off the controls a little which will improve picture quality and may even extend the life of your set.

Since few people have a reference test disc available you'll need to spend a little time looking through your DVDs or watching TV waiting for the right type of image so you can make the changes. I'll give you some clues as to scenes in films that might be appropriate.

Contrast this sets the brilliance of the display. Too much and the whiter parts of the image look bleached out. Look at scenes with clouds (Saving Private Ryan[i/] - Ryan goes to get a new interpreter) or someone dressed in white in an outdoor scene and check if you can see any detail. Reduce the contrast until the detail in the brighter parts of the picture reappears.

Brightness this sets the brightness level of the shadows and darker parts of the picture. It has no real effect on the lighter parts of the picture. Too high and the picture looks grey and washed out, too low and everything in the shadow areas becomes a big black blob. Choose a film like Gladiator[i/] where it is anamorphic (enhanced for widescreen TV) and the aspect ratio is narrow (2.35:1), make sure your DVD player is set to 16:9 and then play the opening battle scene.

Turn the brightness control to 2/3rds. You'll see the picture across the centre of your screen, then a light grey band above and below, then a dark grey band above and below. The lighter grey band is coming off the disc, the darker grey band is the colour of your TV screen. The brightness control is set correctly when the two bands are the same brightness. Now play one of the scenes in the arena. If you can see a step in the two bands then adjust the brightness control until it's correct.

You'll probably find the brightness control needs setting slightly differently when you're watching at night compared to daytime viewing. Don't worry, this is normal. The setting is dependant on ambient lighting.

Colour Brightness has an affect on colour intensity. The lower the brightness control the deeper colours will look. There is no easy way to adjust colour correctly without a test disc. All I can advise is that most TVs have the setting too high.

Sharpness First, turn off any noise reduction facilities on the TV, then choose any film except Pirates of the Caribbean or StarGate, or watch some TV through your ariel and then look to see if people and objects have a 'readybrek' halo around them. If they do then the sharpness control is adding false contours to the image to make you thing it is sharp.

Back-off the control until the halos disappear; with some TVs that might be half way on the scale, others you might go all the way to zero yet still have some halo, it all depends on your TV and the signal quality. Try different channels and discs to get an average of what your set up looks like.

That's about as much as you can do with a TV. There are specialist engineers that can go into service menus to set up the colour balance and grey scale tracking and so on but we're talking about several hundreds of pounds for their services. Alternatively, investing a few pounds in the test disc linked above will help you get the most from your TV and the audio side of your AV setup.

Regards

Hex Spurt

 

And wots wrong with DX t.v? much prefered slow scan telly though,