Panasonic TH42PZ85B (cabling issues)

[d_a_n1979]

My father has recently bought the above along with a Panasonic 'PANASONIC DMREZ27EBK MULTIREGION DVD PLAYER HDMI with VIERA Link' What i need to know is that weve got all the HDMI cables sorted for connecting the TV and DVD but what cables do we need to attach: A standard Virgin Media Digi-cable box and a To attached either the TV or the DVD player/recorder to his Bose Lifestyle 18 system? Thanks for all / any advice.

 

[Andrew Everard]

AFAICR the current standard Virgin box is a Samsung SMT-2110C - a silver one - unless you have the old black Pace box NTL used to supply.

If it's the Samsung, it's a Scart connection to the DVD recorder and another to the TV, or if you don't want to be able to record from the Virgin box to the DVD recorder just a direct Scart connection to the TV.

For audio, we hit a slight snag in that both the Virgin box and the Panasonic have only an optical digital audio output, and the Bose has only one optical input.

The best solution will be to run the optical audio connection from the Panasonic to the Bose, so you get surround sound when playing shop-bought DVD movies.

In order to also connect the Virgin box, you could buy an optical switcher like this one from Maplin, and share the two optical sources into the single input on the Bose. But I'd be tempted not to bother - IIRC the Samsung Virgin box doesn't have analogue audio outputs, so you'll have to buy a Scart cable that splits off the audio and use this to connect to the conventional analogue inputs on the Bose, and deliver the picture to the TV.

This one, also from Maplin, will do the trick.

If you have the TV connected to a conventional aerial as well as Virgin, and want to listen to the TV tuner's sound via the Bose system, you'll need a conventional stereo analogue connection from the TV to the Bose system, too.

If you're unfortunate enough to have one of the old Pace Virgin boxes - the black ex-NTL ones - the above split-Scart hookup will work, too.I can't remember whether these boxes have a separate audio output, but I think they may have had stereo analogue audio, in which case you could use a standard stereo cable into the Bose, and a Scart into the TV.

Phew! Think that covers it...