HD TV with out a dish ? Help from the What hifi team please

[admin_exported]

I should like to upgrade to HD TV. but do not want to install a dish as I live in a very exposed area.

Can I get HD receiption by doing the following and what will the quality be like?

Use a STB (I have a Toppy PVR5800 and TVonics MDR250), take the RGB o/p (scart) into a upscaling receiver, say Denon AVR 1910

and feed this via hdmi to a, say Philips 32pfl7603d HDTV.

This would replace my existing Yamaha RX590rds/Sony kv24wx1u

I would also like to patch in the following Panasonic nv hs950 VCR (good for converting vintage tapes to DVD)Panasonic dmr e50,

and possibly Beogram 1203 and Sansui 1330

Perhaps not the most elegant way, or do I have to wait for Terestial HD ?

Regards

Octagon

 

[The_Lhc]

You could do that (although you can't plug a SCART into the 1910), but you still won't get HDTV as you're not receiving an HD broadcast.

Currently dish or cable are the only choices for broadcast HD, not sure what you meant by an exposed area, why would that stop you getting a dish?

 

[professorhat]

Virgin is currently the only way to get true High Definition television without a dish, though BT Vision offer a lot of on demand programs, some of which are in HD. Freeview HD will change that though in due course.

The issue with trying to get an AV receiver to upscale an STB box like the Toppy is no AV amps have RGB Scart inputs, meaning you have to take a S-Video output into the amp. Since the S-Video signal is of a lower quality than the RGB signal going direct into the TV, any better upscaling you get from using the amp is usually negated by the quality of the S-Video signal. However, any HDTV will able to upscale the scart input so you don't really need to worry about this - just look for an HDTV with a decent TV tuner. Note that upscaled TV is not true High Definition.

If you have a PC / Mac with iTunes, you could also think about Apple TV which lets you download HD TV programs and films and stream them to your TV via the Apple TV box.