Navigating Your TV's
Menus
There’s little doubt that today's TV monitors are
light years ahead of those available only a short while ago. But as the quality and
flexibility have improved, the sets have become much more difficult to operate. My
20-year-old Sony Trinitron used precisely four knobs and one pushbutton to produce what
passed for state-of-the-art images in those days.
Now, TV sets are so complicated that a much broader range
of controls is necessary and, rather than fill up the front panel with tiny knobs and
switches, or creating a remote the size of a shoebox, most manufacturers have developed
computer-style hierarchical controls using on-screen menus.
These can sometimes be fairly unobtrusive, but that's rare.
Mostly they fill the screen with words and symbols that can obliterate what you're trying
to watch. Typically, even the simplest of ongoing operations -- jacking the audio level a
tad, say, or tweaking the tint -- involves calling up an adjustable bar graph at the very
least and adjusting it by up/down buttons on the remote.
With some monitors, the control amenities border on the
insane. One set I was sent for evaluation boasted an elaborate graphic user interface
(GUI) control system, with cute cartoons and a bewildering number of steps you had to
negotiate to do anything. Once you finally arrived at the menu that could actually adjust
something, it was displayed in a panel that obliterated the left-hand third of the screen.
My routine, when I receive a new TV, is to use test signals to set the picture up
properly. In this case, however, the control panel blocked a significant portion of the
test signal, so the only way I could make the adjustments was to tinker with what I could
see, kill the graphic, check what had been behind it and, if it needed further
alterations, call up the menu again.
Still, the problem here was easy to identify -- stupidity
-- and there was an easy if time-consuming workaround. But other, more baffling problems
can crop up that may require a fairly intimate knowledge of the television system even to
identify, let alone fix.
Some months ago, an acquaintance visited me, and I
demonstrated to him whatever home-theater setup I had in place at the time. He was duly
impressed, but his appreciation turned to amazement when I switched over to a local
off-air broadcast. Like me, he lives in an area that, although residential and fairly
prosperous, is just a little too far off the beaten track for the cable monopolies to be
bothered with.
Without cable, he felt there was little point in upgrading
his television. But watching the pristine off-air signals delivered by my rooftop antenna,
he obviously decided it was now time to upgrade. We both live about the same distance from
downtown Toronto: too far for cable, maybe, but close enough for flawless direct
reception.
Last week he called me in despair. He had gone out and
plunked down a fair piece of change to buy a new TV, only to find that it could only pick
up some channels. Specifically, VHF channels (2-13) were fine, but nothing in the UHF band
(14 and up) came in at all.
I'm hardly a TV repairman, but in this case I had a pretty
good idea what might be happening, and it seemed easier to go there and try to sort it out
than to describe what steps he might try over the phone. When I got there, sure enough,
the VHF stations came in with that sort of sheen that cable signals can never quite
duplicate, but the upper band was a mess of blinks and snow. I realized the problem was
that the monitor was set up for cable, not for off-air signals, and we'd simply have to
switch over.
For reasons both historical and technical, the signals
delivered by an antenna and by cable are very different, even though they may carry the
same programming and connect to the same terminal on the back of your TV or VCR.
A television signal occupies an enormous amount of the
radio spectrum. When the North American TV system was set up, it was impossible to find a
chunk of bandwidth big enough to hold 12 channels on adjacent frequencies. As a result,
the VHF band occupies three fairly widely spaced chunks of the radio band: channels 2-4,
then a gap, channels 5 and 6, another, bigger gap, then channels 7-13. It's because of
this discontinuity that channels are identified by arbitrary numbers rather that their
frequencies, and the click-stop action of the original tuners simply jumped over the gaps.
Originally, cable was designed simply to deliver these channels, so the frequencies of
2-13 are the same over cable on over the air to this day.
It didn't take long for those channels to fill up, however.
For broadcasters, the UHF band was established at a much higher frequency, but cable
systems soon realized that UHF signals didn't travel well over their wires. But although
the gaps in the VHF band were filled with various communications services over the air, on
the cables they were blank.
Extra channels could be inserted in these spaces, and in
the frequencies just above and below the VHF band proper, and be carried by cable with no
problem. Some companies simply numbered them from 14 upward, others gave them letters, but
they had nothing whatever to do with the original frequencies of the material they
contained.
Had my friend realized any of this, he might have hunted
for an antenna/cable option. It did exist, but buried deep in a sub-menu of a sub-menu. We
found it and solved the problem, but not before reflecting that the set maker had made
things unnecessarily difficult. As it happens, the set's remote does let you select
between two antenna inputs, and it would probably have been a simple matter to have one
set up for cable and the other for off-air. There are lots of viewers who would like that
option, and hardly any who have two antennas or two cable feeds, but with this set, once
you find the selector, it makes both inputs one or the other.
Back to the drawing board, guys!
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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