As I’ve blogged before, our TV has been on the fritz, with the power not coming on reliably when you press the power button — or coming on long after the fact. Given that we’ve had this TV for a dozen years or so, that’s not surprising.
We were holding out on replacing it, though, until Jim and Ginger came out to visit, since Jim was responsible for the original entertainment cabinetry in the family room, thus ideal for how we can go from the traditional 4:3 CRT form factor to a new, widescreen, HDTV thang.
Well, much discussion, visits to Best Buy and Costco, measurements and remeasurements and discussions later — we, like the Cylons, “have a plan.”
Well, we have multiple plans.
Plan #1 had little to do with the TV itself, but with the downlights over the TV and adjoining window. These went up with the cabinetry, but have long had a problem, in that the lower part (where the light sits) never connected well with the bracket (that would hold the lights up to the ceiling). Thus, they would tend to come loose and dangle.
Plus, even when more or less in place, these were fairly early generation inexpensive halogen downlights, and their gold-finished plastic look just didn’t quite cut it.
When out in California over the holidays, we found a much nicer set of three, with actual metal containers, which should both look better and hold better. Problem being, of course, that the wiring wasn’t the same, and the old wiring did some behind-the-scenes/walls routing through the cabinetry we’d built.
To make a long story (and long task) short, we were successful in threading the new lights over from the window, and though I managed to lose the wire going up to the ceiling, we came up with an alternative routing that worked just fine. Huzzah.
So, new downlights are in place and switched, and look quite nice.
That all provided a good excuse for clearing out all the stuff we’d need to clear out around the new TV installation. Further since the new TV was all oooh-aaah HDTV, we’d need different cables running to/from the receiver, etc. This was an excellent opportunity to sift out and clean up the cable tangle inside the cabinet, which, after about half an hour or so, was done.
(Btw, we have an extra, unused, 5-disc CD changer, if anyone local wants it. We haven’t used it in, oh, five years or so, and clearly will not any time soon. Give a holler.)
Given that the TV we wanted was going to be wider than the space (to get one that would fit in the cabinet would actually require the display to be a bit shorter than the old TV, which clearly was not what we wanted), we had two choices. Jim’s original thought was to carve back into the cabinet, making the upper part cantilever a bit over the TV. That raised some structural issues for the cabinet, though, not to mention being extra work and potentially limiting for the next TV we might get.
The alternative was to mount it outside the front of the existing cabinet, letting it overhand on either side. Jim was initially dubious of this, but it was by far the easier course and, we think, will look okay.
First off, the actual purchase.
- Went to Best Buy. They were out of the mounting rack we wanted. Well, we could spend extra for one that moved in extra directions, but …
- While there, bought some component video cables. The receiver we bought a year and a half ago doesn’t have HDMI (funky digital video connections), which was by design, but, jut as I knew I would regret it, I kind of regret it. I do have a DVI out from the cable box, and so I could get a converter between that and the HDMI — maybe in the future. The component video should be okay for the nonce. Meanwhile, very carefully bypassed the $80-90 Monster Component Video Cables with Gold Tips and Ermine-Lined Plenum, and instead went around to a much less prominent display with the $20-30 component video cables.
- Went to Costco and picked up the new TV — a Toshiba REGZA 42XV540U LCD. And, since Margie did the amortization of the price differential over the suspected life of the TV, we ended up with a 42″ rather than a 40″. Which is quite an uptick over the 27″ CRT we previously had. It does 1080p (which we can’t fully exploit yet with the component video) and 120MHz (woo-hoo), and should do us nicely for a while.
- Costco also had the mounting rack we needed, for $20 less than Best Buy had it, and $50 less than the substitute that Best Buy had. Woot.
Came home, did some unpacking and examining and measuring. The intent is to mount a couple of 4x4s vertically at the front of the cabinet opening, secured through the top and bottom from the shelves above and below, then mount the mounting rack to that, then hang the TV off that. The clearance is just about what we want. That will leave a large, empty space behind the TV (which you wont be able to see because the TV blocks it), but as part of the recabling we have some stuff sitting on that shelf, and we’ve moved other stuff down to the shelf below that, leaving the shelf with the cable and receiver as empty as we can leave it.
That’s as far as we got before we ran off to an early supper. I’m working from home today, and Jim will be doing the carpentry setup (including putting some trim up on the upper cabinet where the doors used to hang), so we should get it set up, I hope, later today.
Then, of course, will come all the tricksy bits of configuring the cable box, receiver, and TV to work and play well with each other and the various picture quality settings and auto-settings and with the DVD player, too. I suspect that’s the part of this project were I’ll be pulling out what little remains of my hair. We’ll see.
But … getting excited!
(As a side note, allow me to say that I hate all TV manufacturers, who seem to be more busy trying to give themselves a competitive advantage by not only spewing out an alphabet soup of cabling and connectivity features, but which mask any standard terms through registered trademarked versions of them — e.g., Toshiba has DynaLight and ColorBurst and PixelPure and ClearFrame and StableSound … and every other manufacturer does the same sort of thing. Makes comparison shopping a lot more difficult, which, of course, seems to be the idea.)