Saturday, May 9, 2009

Weekends are made to be screwy, I guess

So, Friday, I finally got around to seeing about getting the speakers I'd blown fixed--Only to discover that the cabinets were solid, sealed units, not designed to have any sort of repair work done on them; It would cost less to buy equivalents used than to get those replaced.

So I walked out with a pair of KEF C40s. Eventually got them home (around 2AM) and hooked up, listened to them briefly and quietly (It was after 2AM, remember) and marveled at how they sounded better than anything I'd had before. Then I went to sleep.

Woke up, went to listen to them at a more interesting volume, and discovered that my PS3 wouldn't provide videogood HDMI video output for the life of me; None of the input devices could get a reaction out of it, and the only image on the screen was a line of multi-colored pixels reminiscent of the old "tutti frutti" effect in the DOS days of DOOM. Restarting the PS3 didn't to fix it.

Resigned that I was going to have to fall back on the manufacturer's warranty, I started looking around for all the components for when it came time to ship the thing to Sony. I was particularly interested in finding the composite video output adapter, as any normal troubleshooting sequence would involve testing that to determine whether and how the system was completely hosed.

Couldn't find the darn thing. So I drove over to where I remembered seeing someone waving a sign advertising a new new/used buy/sell/trade video game store, to pick one up. Couldn't find them. Had to go to Gamestop. On the way home, lo and behold, there was a kid waving that advertising sign again. He missed a sale by about an hour. (On a summer Saturday, it takes forever to get into the local mall, get into the Gamestop, buy the item and get back out.)

Get home, go to hook up the NTSC output and--there's the original cable. It was hooked up to the TV the whole time; I just hadn't been using it. Get composite hooked up again, switch to it on the TV, and it works! And the audio worked wonderfully.

Cutting the remainder of the story short, Composite and component works, HDMI doesn't, no matter how I slice it, restore it to manufacturer defaults, or juggle it upside-down under a full moon. Since component works, I can still get 1080i on my TV, but it's not ideal because some of the HD output features of the PS3 are disabled if the copyright protection features of HDMI are missing.

At this point, there's not a whole lot more I can do to troubleshoot, and it's not a certainty what or which piece of equipment is broken. It could be the HDMI cable, and I can pick up a replacement cable at some point to test that. It could be the HDMI hardware of the PS3, or the HDMI hardware of the TV, but since I only have one HDMI source and one HDMI display, that's hard to test. The closest I could come would be to use a system with a DVI output and convert it to HDMI, but I've only got one computer with DVI video output, but I haven't used it because I don't have a DVI monitor at home. I could use an HDMI2DVI adapter and plug into the TV's DVI input, but that's not particularly definitive as the TV might use the same hardware for consuming both.

But the audio's still sweet...

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