Harman Kardon AVR 1700 with Toshiba Blu-ray screen noise

I just picked up the AVR 1700 and have found that my Toshiba Blu-ray player that I've had for a year gets screen noise when hooked up to the AVR 1700. The problem does not happen when I connect my cable box via HDMI through the AVR 1700, the picture looks just fine.

I tried a couple different HDMI cables and different connectors on the AVR 1700 itself to no avail.

Also, when I hook the Blu-ray directly to the TV, the screen looks just fine.

Does anybody have any ideas before I take this AVR 1700 back to Best Buy?

Not sure a picture of the screen would do it justice, it's just minor static through out.

I just discovered that if I change the resolution on the Blu-ray to 1080i or 720p that noise goes away, but that's certainly not acceptable.

Tonight I returned the unit to Best Buy since they finally had more in stock. They sold out because of the $199 price tag so I had to wait until they got another unit in.

I brought the new AVR 1700 right home and hooked it up.

This time I got about a minute of extremely grainy video on my HD FIOS signal and then the video totally died. The unit would not pass any video to the TV set at all although I could hear the sound.

I tried everything.... 4 different HDMI cables.... different HDMI ports on the TV. Nothing. This unit was DOA for video from the get go. I had no problem getting video on the set once I took the AVR out of the equation going straight from FIOS box to TV.

So I'm 0-2 with the AVR 1700s and I'm done. This is going back to Best Buy tomorrow after work and I will buy something else even if it costs me $200 more at this point. These units are garbage. No wonder they're trying to unload them for cheap. It makes sense now.

My TV does accept 1080p. It's a Samsung 1080p 50" Plasma set that I've had for about 4 years. But there's more to the story...

Tonight I returned unit #2 and because the other receiver that I've been considering is completely sold out locally I decided to give the Harman Kardon another try if I could find one. A different Best Buy had a couple in stock so I went there. They actually hooked up the receiver I was returning (unit #2) and had the same problem: no video signal.

I came home and hooked up unit #3 and everything is working fine so far. I get a nice signal from my FIOS TV and the 1080p from the Toshiba Blu-ray player is perfect.

So, believe it or not I happened to have 2 defective units. I hope it was just extremely bad luck and this unit continues to work for a long time.

So another follow up. This afternoon I hooked everything up completely. All connections. All the HDMI connections seem to work fine, however the video composite connections on this AVR-1700 simply don't work. I hooked our WII up and figured I'd run it through the AVR-1700 and while I get sound, I get no video on either Composite 1 or 2. When I connect this to the composite connection on the TV itself, no problem at all.

So again, another problem with the AVR-1700 which makes me wonder about the build quality of these things. 3 different units and 3 different problems.

I'm exasperated at this point and since I really don't need the composite connection (I'll use the one on the TV itself) I'm going to stick with this unit because frankly I'm beaten down and don't want to go through this again. I'm going to hope and pray that something else on this unit doesn't die in 3 months, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

After thinking about it more, maybe I'm wrong on this one. If I'm going into the AVR-1700 with composite, maybe I have to run composite out of the AVR-1700 to the TV? It's not going to convert that analog signal to HDMI digital.

Ok, makes sense. This unit seems to be working fine then.