musicbox

I've not purchased a home receiver in a while but have been eyeballing Harmon/Kardon for a couple years now. I'm very impressed with the specs of them.

majormojo

I have an H/K amp that I bought about 20 yrs ago (with student loan money, hehe). It's built like a tank and still works well. I've read that they've since moved some mfg to China and some products are better than others now, but generally H/K gets pretty good reviews. As far as their specs go, if they are still like they used to be, the published specs are quite conservative and the equipment can actually perform as they say it can.

elduderino

Yeah, HK has gotten competitive again with home theatre, taken lotta market share from Yamaha.

I always had a soft spot for Denon, and was curious to see how it had changed since I used to sell it. The receiver seems pretty good. Manual is not clear, but done well as far as accuracy, just not well thought out - pretty standard.

The HK I would have liked was out of stock at the distributor that we got the TV from, or I would have gotten that at cost too... so I went with the Denon. I like the HK styling but my wife likes the Denon looks better, I think (the HK looked kinda avant-guard for her...)

Update on Comcast: The new OSD guide signal freaks out every Motorola HD cable box there is. It locks up like once an hour or so - the "IR button received" light goes on for as long as it's locked up, a minute or three - and after the light goes out, all the commands ignored during the lockup trigger right away. Way irritating.

They are getting me the new HD DVR box on Tuesday for the same price for 6 months. At the end of six months they will have replaced the non-DVR boxes and I can go back. I am simplifying a very long and painful conversation with multiple reps.

I also found a problem with how Comcast sells HD. They tell you (or did) that you will get any HD channel of the current package you get. If you have their non-Digital Standard service (no set-top required) and you upgrade to HD, you do NOT get ESPN HD or Discovery HD... they are not giving me 6 free months of the upgraded service for free (actually, I bumped two levels and and getting credit for the first bump).

They also had someone tell me at first that I couldn't touch the DVR box at all and only the tech could plug it into my system... I reacted well to that. Now I get to make the connections while they're there to see if any problems occur.

As far as the remote goes, we'll see if it works OK - I already ordered it... I am not too worried about the macro programming glitch, as I only expect to have a couple of those to program. I plan on using NiCds too, so the annoyance of batteries won't be too bad, and I figure that's the backlighting... we'll see.

So if I like the Comcast HD DVR I can cancel TiVo... we'll see.

elduderino

Update:

The DCT6400 HD STB with DVR looks identical to the DCT5100. Different remote though.

Doesn't seem to have the lockup problem so far. HOWEVER, on two different signals I could see digital pixilation on the edge of brightly-colored moving images which was not seen on the 5100. (Charlies Angels-Full Throttle was on HBO, and Stanford was playing USF on INHD1). The motorcycle race scene was noticeably bad, and when the Stanford players in their red unis would run fast, their edges were blurred.

Called Comcast. Now, Comcast has rolled out some kind of HD DVR to many markets across the US before they got to mine, but the tech guys only have access to info about calls from this market. Since I am an early adopter in this market, no one has called. They don't know.

I called Motorola. They checked, and lo and behold, the 6400 series uses an algorithm with more compression to the video signal than the 5100 or 6200 series of STB without DVR. They are compressing the signal to fit it onto the HDD and I see the image post-compression - just like with a TiVo.

What they could have done was allowed the user to switch between DVR-less algorithms with best picture, or DVR algorithms with slightly degraded image at times. But noooooo. This would have required Comcast to ADMIT that there is a video quality difference between the two boxes, and they are unable to deal with small differences like this - they can't even sell HD with the right channel lineup!

I am waiting for the repair super at Comcast to hook up these two boxes and watch the OnDemand version of Charlie's Angels on each box on their HD on the bench.

So now my options seem to be an STB with no DVR but with a great picture and a lockup problem (and an analog TiVo box), or an STB with a DVR and no lockup problem but with an occasionally degraded system. Oh, or DirectTV HD.