I have a Brand new Toshiba Cinema series 36 "TV with Lexicon MC1 pre amp, and new JVC SVHS HR S9600. My cable tv can be viewed directly through my Ant 1 input and the picture is about as good as you will get from any cable system, however because all of my components DVD,LD,SAT are feeding through my LEX with S-video they are viewed through one video one input. I have excellent cables for all components. Can anyone help me figure out how there is so much degredation of picture quality when run through the VCR tuner? Thanks

You have two choices when running cable. You can daisy chain it from wall to VCR (to DVD) (to DSS) and then to your TV. OR you can get a signal splitter/amplifier from radio shack. Take the cable feed from the wall and run it into the splitter. Take each amplified output from this splitter and run them directly to your tuner devices (VCRs and TVs). You will eliminate any degridation caused by passing the cable signal thru the VCR before it gets to the TV. Use your TV's tuner when watching TV. Use the VCR's tuner when recording off cable.

There is no need to run cableTV to a DVD or DSS device. They have no built in cable tuner. They only provide "pass-thru" to simplify some setups.

Dave

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