Hey Dave,

Congrats on the new system.

First,when viewing cable thru your system (VCR>MC-1) the cable signal is being demodulated from RF into a line level video signal, which may be the cause of your degredation.

Second, by the fact that you wonder about the VCR tuner, I assume you've run from the VCR straight into the TV to determine this.

Anyway, to utilize the PIP on my TV I split the signal between the main Antenna Input and the Decoder. From the decoder I run thru the VCR RF pass thru to the AUX antenna input, so I can view and record.

For actual VCR, and all other video viewing, I too, run them thru my av controller, a Parasound AVC-2500, so I use only one input.

This way, with the Pronto and discrete codes, I just switch between the AUX and VIDEO 2 inputs for TV and Video viewing.

Happy holidays