QUALIA 006 Owner's Thread - Page 20

Thanks for the info Penton-Man. Good stuff. Because of all you guys, I'm becoming a av expert. Yeah Baby!!!!!!!!!

I really don't understand why this set which displays 1920x1280 does not have an 1080P input.

There are some excellent scalers on the market that scale to 1080P, such as Lumagen and Faroudja. And the new Naim DVD5 has an upgrade card (Faroudja) coming later this year that will scale to 1080P. I am sure that all these scalers are far superior to anything Sony has built in.

And from what I have seen, the Sony scaler does not always do a very good job. I saw a PBS wide-screen upconvert that looked absolutely atrocious on the Qualia ... there was a boat traveling across wave swept water ... the water was a mass of large pixels! It was unwatchable!

One other point - I hate the fact that Sony in there wisdom does not allow each input to be setup independently. After all this is not a product for the average consumer. It is a product aimed at the Videophile.

I am not trying to flame this product - I have always been a huge fan of Sony products (I have never owned anything but Sony televisions) ... and still am (I just bought a top of the line Sony Vaio desktop computer), but there are times that I get frustrated with some of their product designs, because I think they could be even better with the right corporate decisions. We shall see how this product evolves over the next couple of years.

I am very pleased to hear this as I mistakenly thought I had read otherwise.

I am sure that if I bought the Qualia I would be very pleased with it too. In fact if they bring out a 60" version I may indeed buy one! I bought the Sony KV36XBR400 a few years ago. There are a few minor things that I could quibble about, but I have very much enjoyed watching HDTV and DVD's on this set over those years.

Penton-man, Colortv;

I am traveling so I can't read the manual on this or test it... If we move our DVI-HDMI cable to Video 7, is there a way to get audio form the TV. I thought the reson they had Audio connectors tied to 6 was for the DVI to HDMI connection. I want to be able to have the TV speakers work without the stereo.

Like I said, on my display I was a bit disappointed. But I have a large crt that can't display the full resolution of HD, and also has a pretty low light output.
I have seen some spectacular pics from a roku hooked up to a plasma though. I'd love to see it hooked up to an 006!

They had been selling them at Goodguys and Tweeter (I think). Maybe you could pick one up and try it out & return it if it's not up to par...

I have a question to those who have the 006.

Please try to put early adopter pricing aside. Now that you have some experience with the 006, what do you think it should be priced at if there were 3-4 comparable models from other vendors?

Thanks!

Unfortunately, the answer is no. The audio-in connectors next to the HDMI inputs are connected to input 6 only, and not input 7. You could leave the DVI to HDMI cable connected to input 6, and the first time you access that input during a viewing session, simply press the channel up or wide mode button to get rid of the double picture. You'll then be fine until you shut off the set top box and turn it on again. The other option, of course, is to use input 7, and connect an optical digital audio cable between the set top box and an AV receiver and get the sound from an AV receiver. That's what I do, and I avoid the double picture problem (at least last night I did, we'll see what happens tonight).

I've had the roku for a while but do not use it very much. It basically became a slide show machine because they could not get the function to play .vob files with full menu support working properly. They might have gotten that to work by now. They also don't have a pure digital connection only component. You can get the same functionality to work with the built-in memory card slot and the app that comes with the 006. The art packs do look stunning though. I was amazed how nice they looked on my 1st 1080p set and they look very good also on the 006. If you like to tweak, I would suggest just getting a cheap htpc and connecting it via one of the hdmi ports on the 006. You will have so much more flexibility and get the purest pq. With the new nvidia cards it also becomes much more plug and play also.
brgds,
jp

10K list with most retailers selling it at a 10% discount.

Until about 1 year ago, Sony did not provide separate memories for each input. Thankfully, they now do for all their high-end sets including the 006 and their fine pitch CRT sets (and I'm sure also for all their XBR LCD/Plasma sets).

Kaduku-

Ok let's try to figure this out. I need to know exactly what audio and video connections you have set up to the 006, and to which inputs.

You have a Directv receiver and DVD player and both have an optical digital out cable running to an optical digital cable switch and then to the BOSE. To which inputs are the Directv receiver and DVD player connected to on the 006?

What you saw had nothing to do with the scaler. It was the result of over compressing the MPEG-2 bitstream. If there was a scaling problem it would probably have been at PBS since there widescreen material is normally scaled to 1080i before transmission over the HD feed. The Qualia 006 does not scale 1080i input, it deinterlaces it.

I must admit that I have occasionally seen some bad pixelation from PBS upconverts on my Sony KV36XBR400. Due to the much larger screen size on the Qualia, it is only make sense that it is going to emphasize these shortcomings more. I guess until PBS HD starts producing all their programming in HD there is nothing at our end that is going to correct their scaling problems and we will have to live with them ... or just not watch those programs!

nhey, kaduku -
I tinkered around with the settings last night, and came to the conclusion that the lack of audio over hdmi is the HD-TIVO's fault. It happens only when watching DolbyDigital or HD content, and if you go into the TIVO's settings->audio, you can tell the TIVO to output non-dolby audio, but that goes for BOTH the HDMI and the SPDIF (optical, whatever) outputs. I could toggle this setting back and forth and the audio would come through both the TV (via HDMI) & the stereo (non dolby); or through the receiver (dolby) only. Again, this was true (for me) ONLY on Dolby Digital content and HD content on the TIVO. Wondering if this is an HDMI limitation (no DD) or something else. I'm not sure if a separate toslink from TIVO to 006 in addition to HDMI would give DD or not...

It is actually an HDMI limitation, and not, in this case, a problem with the HD-TIVO. Check this out:

http://news.designtechnica.com/talkback45.html

I couldn't believe this when I first read it, but HDMI as currently implemented, does not carry DD5.1. A separate Toslink is needed to carry it.

Scenes of moving water (roaring oceans, for example) are notorious for giving microdisplays problems. I've made a point of looking carefully at moving water scenes on DiscoveryHD over the one week I've owned the 006, and have never seen any pixelation or any problem whatsoever. It was a PBS overcompression issue , as suggested above, you encountered, I'm certain.

Wow. Well that settles that. Thanks nhey. (actually, this has just made me wonder... is it the TIVO that doesn't send 5.1, the TV that doesn't receive it, or both? forward compatibility at stake... anyone have a DVD player that outputs 5.1 via HDMI want to test this out?)

If 1080i-delivered PBS shows MPEG-2 breakups, perhaps this is related to station multicasting. Lots of reports on these forums of PBS stations squeezing in way too many subchannels. The minimal bit rate then devoted to 1080i spoils what originally was/is some of the best 1080i quality broadcasts; (breakups and greatly reduced resolution). -- John

ext : I'd say lower that $10k since it was originally slated to come out at that price. and with 3-4 competing products it should be more in line with Sony's previous 70" Model pricing. I'd say somewhere in the range of $6-8k. I know I may get flack from those who recently bought this at $13k. But most people really can't afford that. bringing it down to about half it's current price should make Sony a fortune if this set really is that much better than it's competition.

The TIVO definitely outputs 5.1 over optical cables, but can't output DD5.1 over its HDMI output, since that output doesn't support DD5.1. As a result the TV doesn't get it since it hasn't been sent it.

Wow!
That is quite stunning and disappointing.

nhey- understood. question is, if we did have a source capable of outputting 5.1 over HDMI (which from my read of the article you posted is within the HDMI spec) , could the 006 play some form of audio with that signal? currently not that important, but maybe in the future it will be...?

You won't beat me to the punch this time!
At 6K, I'll buy one for my garage.

Speaking of 2nd sets, my recent purchase of the 006 has left me long a Marantz VP-12S1 (early adopter, ya think?) front projector, which is great but didn't suit the room the 006 now sits in. Question for the group: where is the best place to dispose of a 3yr old DLP only lightly used? ebay? videogon? anyone have any experience selling this sort of thing before?

Don't know for sure what will need to be changed to allow 5.1 over HDMI. Will it be new hardware? Who knows?

Try Videogon for your projector sale. That is a very good site from personal selling experience, albeit, not a projector.

You see my point. about $6-8k I'd also probably buy one in a second once I saw one based on the reports of this forum. It would really depend on Sony's ability to Mass produce them. would they make up the profits in volume. At that price I think they would. This is the sort of break through PQ that Sony should use to cut in to Samsungs RPTV market share. But I doubt we'll see prices like that before next year. At that point there will be a lot of 1080p competitors in stores and most people just won't shell out twice the money for the improved picture quality. It's sad but true. This has been demonstrated for years with consumers purchasing computers based on specs that aren't the most important factors in their computers real world performance. But yes if Sony comes in line with the rest of the market and with their own previous RPTV price ranges and comes down in the $6-8K range for the 70" They'll have my money. But my money won't be around for ever. I expect to be siting down and watching my money at work this summer.

I watched a bit of CSI on CBS last night via my Comcast 6412 DVR. The HD show looked awesome, and even the SD 4:3 black pillarbox commercials inserted by the network looked great. Crisp and near-HD quality - very impressive. But when the station break occurred and our local KCBS commercials were shown, SD got ugly real fast. The commercials and a plug for the 11 clock news appeared poorly scaled, heavily compressed and fuzzy, with gray 4:3 pillarbox rather than the network's black pillarbox.

Can anyone speculate why the local SD stuff over the same digital channel looks so much worse than the network feed? Perhaps the scaler used at KCBS is "dollar ninety eight" quality or maybe all the local inserts are come from a very low def, highly compressed server? I know CBS HD broadcasts are 1080i, but is everything on the digital transmission stream at 1080i such that any 480i video needs to be scaled up to 1080i by the local station? Or ... perhaps the local stuff was transmitted at 480i and my Comcast box scaled it up to 1080i to send to the Qualia? My Comcast box is set to force 1080i output.

Of course this is not a Qualia 006 problem - the TV is only showing the best and worst of the incoming video.

On 1080i HD channels any 480i SD material is normally scaled to 1080i before being transmitted. So the problem is at KCBS which is surprising because WCBS here in New York does a decent job of upconverting SD. In fact all the major networks provide a good upconvert.