Back in January of 2003 a short press release went out from DirecTV and TiVo stating that they were working on a High Definition TiVo that would be out later in the year. What a tease! It wasn't until early in 2004 that we were able to put ourselves on a waiting list with a company that claimed they would be one of the first to have them. In June there was word that they had started to ship, but our supplier had no idea when they would be getting them. On a whim we checked the Circuit City website and found that they had just received some and had them in stock! We ordered one and had it two days later, along with a new oval dish and attic antenna.

As opposed to the single satellite used for normal DirecTV signals, HDTV is carried on a different satellite, just to the right of the first one. This requires a special oval dish which can pick up all three of DirecTV's satellites. We contacted a local installer to come by and replace our existing round dish with a new oval one, and to run two new wires out to the dish. The oval dishes have a built-in multiplexer, so they provide four fully independent outputs. We have two running to the HD-TiVo, the other two go to the bedroom and the computer room, where we have standard DirecTV receivers. They were able to use our existing mounting bracket on the side of the house, and one of the existing coax lines was used to pull the new extra lines, so the whole dish install took only about 2 hours. The HD TiVo unit has two terrestrial tuners in it, in addition to the two satellite tuners. This allows it to pick up local High Definition programs through an antenna which we hung in the attic.

Once the dish was hooked up, we got to see our first HD programming, and it looked great! We discovered, however, that our three year old "HD Compatible" Sony rear-projection set wasn't fully compatible with the TiVo. On very bright scenes, the TV would lose sync and the picture would become distorted. Three years ago the HD specs hadn't been fully worked out, the likely cause for the incompatibility. What to do? We decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get a new TV!

After checking a few of the local big-screen TV stores and comparing plasma, DLP, and LCD, plasma looked like the way to go. The colors were much more vivid, the contrast was better and the viewing angles were fantastic. They looked really amazing, especially the big ones. Cost was the big issue; we had to decide between a 50" set or something larger. Looking around online it became clear that we could save about 30%, which made the larger sets look more attractive. We finally decided on a Samsung 63" set (HPN6339) from a retailer in New York. It was the largest comercially available plasma at the time. The TV's native resolution is 1368x768, so it's basically a direct 720p display. We had it shipped out the next day, then we just had to wait for it!

In preparation for the new set, we moved the old set to the side, then pulled all of our existing A/V gear out from behind. We went with a new stand from Salamander Designs that was much sleeker and more like furniture than anything else we had seen. It allowed for three short stacks of gear (with doors to enclose the side stacks), keeping the TV at the proper viewing height (your eyes should be approximately level with the middle of the screen). The TV sits on top, mounted to it's pedestal base. We decided to sell the iMac we had been using as a digital music server, and replaced it with a 12" PowerBook that we placed on the other side of the room (by the couch), with a wireless network connection using an Airport Express. That allowed the new TV to be moved further back into the corner, making the whole thing look much cleaner. The new stand looked so nice, we decided to get a new sectional couch and coffee table to spruce up the whole room. Now we can very comfortably seat eight as opposed to just four previously.

To get the best possible picture quality from standard definition programming and DVDs, we bought an iScan HD from DVDO. It's a digital image scaler which does very high quality up-scale, and can zoom letterboxed standard definition images to fill the 16:9 screen. Another benefit of the iScan is that it has a digital audio delay built into it. One thing that's not talked about much with HD is that you usually have your audio and video moving through two different paths: video goes to the TV, audio goes through your amplifier. Many HD TVs introduce a several frame delay into the signal that is fed to them, which results in the audio being ahead of the video. We had this situation, and it was sometimes very noticeable, looking kind of like a badly dubbed movie. Fortunately the iScan's audio delay can be adjusted to restore perfect lip-sync. The iScan also performs automatic switching on it's inputs, based on which ones have signal. This means we can just turn on the DVD player and the TV and receiver automatically switch to it. The TiVo generates either 480i or 720p, depending on the program, and the DVD player generates 480p. The 480i and 480p signals are up-converted by the iScan to 720p for nice clean viewing.

To control the system we decided to ditch our old programmable remote and go with a new Harmony 688. It's an all in one unit which is programmed through their website and has plenty of 'hard' buttons for controlling the HD TiVo. You follow some pages which ask what components you have and how they are hooked up, and then you connect a USB cable and the configuration is downloaded into your remote. It's so much easier than programming our old remote (which was done using a PC program that we ran under Virtual PC). The Harmony is currently replacing 11 remotes, and it does so in a very intuitive manner: you select the "activity" you want to perform, and it switches the appropriate components on and off to match. "Watch TV", "Watch DVD", "Listen to Music" is what the activity buttons are marked. Very slick.

The last component that was added was a Roku HD-1000 digital media player. This is a device which can take digital pictures and display them as a High Definition (720p) slide show. It can read pictures from a Compact Flash card inserted into it's front slot, or it can do it over a network from a server. We have it set up to read them from the PowerBook on the other side of the room, over the wireless connection (which is high speed WiFi - 802.11g). Our digital pictures look amazing five feet wide! One other feature of the Roku is that if it detects a still image being fed through it for more than 5 minutes, it puts up a screen-saver. This is really great with a plasma display, since leaving one image paused on the screen for too long can 'burn' the image into the screen.

Our existing audio gear is still very much state of the art, even though it's 6 years old. The receiver does Dolby Digital and DTS, and pumps out 120W per channel. We have a second amplifier rated at 100W that drives the "bass shaker" that's mounted under the floor below the couch. Boston Acoustics front speakers with subwoofers worked perfectly at the sides of the new stand, and the center channel speaker fit perfectly in the middle of the stand, right under the TV. Our Cambridge SoundWorks surround speakers fill out the rear channel. Digital audio is routed from the HD TiVo, the DVD player and the Airport Express, through the iScan and the Roku to the Yamaha receiver. This gives us a fully digital path for the audio, and the best possible sound quality. The only analog audio in the system is the path from the TiVo to the RF modulator. It certainly cuts down on the cable clutter, since each stereo digital stream is carried on a single cable, most of which are optical.

For viewing the TiVo on the other TVs around the house, we use a digital modulator which broadcasts the signal on channel 77 on the cable running through the house. Using an RF based remote control from the bedroom allows us to watch and control TiVo from the bedroom. The only thing that we can't do right now is watch TV in the bedroom if the TiVo is playing back HD in the family room; the HD TiVo doesn't output anything on it's composite port when it's playing back HD on it's component ports. Not a big deal at this point, though it may be the instigator for an HD TV in the bedroom at some point...

The new setup is really awesome, movies in HD look amazing and it's great to see so much detail in programs on Discovery HD. It was a real learning process to figure out all of the components that would work together, but the result has been totally worth it! Now we just need a few more HD channels on the satellite...