Lately, it has seemed that my usual Midas touch with technology (just ask my mom) has been fading. The DVD player that I got for Christmas wouldn’t work with any TV in my grandparents’ house because none of them had A\/V inputs, only coax inputs. So I took a little trip to Radio Shack to get an RF converter. This should solve my problem, I thought. I also bought another coax cable to complete the new connection I would make from the RF converter to the TV. $37 later, I was set to go. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n
\nI got home and made all the necessary connections, according to the instructions. Then I turned on the DVD player and dropped my newly-bought, eagerly-anticipated copy of The Matrix<\/i> into the system. I turned the TV to channel 3.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
Okay, so maybe I had the RF converter set to channel 4 instead. I checked. No dice. Well, maybe the 75K ohm should be set to 1M instead. Nope. Maybe the A\/V cables weren’t in all the way or in the right place. No such luck. I wasn’t even getting a signal from the RF converter. The LED indicator just under the ON label was dark as it was ere it came out of its box.<\/p>\n
Sigh. So I packed it back up and took it back to Radio Shack. That’s okay, I needed a new TV anyway, right? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
So a couple of days of searching and traveling all over the great city of Birmingham, Alabama led me to a set with all the features that I wanted at a price that I was willing to pay. I was especially excited about the S-video and front input jacks that were included. Sadly, I would come to rue the day these features were on my TV. (Sidebar: does one ever rue anything else but a day? It’s like using the word “ensuing” only to describe a kickoff on SportsCenter. You never hear the word anywhere else in any other context. At least I don’t. Anyway…)<\/p>\n
I got the set home, and with some effort got it up onto the chest of drawers where the old set once sat. I plugged in the coax and ensured that everything worked properly there, and then I proceeded to go through 30 doubly frustrating minutes. I say “doubly frustrating” because it first frustrates you during the time period itself, and it later frustrates you in a head-slapping, “of course it was that<\/i> easy; I’m just a moron” sort of fashion.<\/p>\n
I got the S-video cable plugged into the back of the TV. Then I got the A\/V cables that came with the DVD player and plugged the audio cables into the front A\/V jacks, because I thought that it would be easier to deal with that way. If I knew then what I know now…<\/p>\n
I turned on the set and the DVD player and went to the VID channel, bypassing the mysterious FRNT channel on the way. I was greeted with the menu sequence of The Matrix<\/i> in grainy black and white and with no sound.<\/p>\n
Hey, it was farther than I had gotten with the RF converter. At least I had a picture now. So what was the problem? After a few minutes of randomly looking through menus, I stumbled upon the video channel input settings. I discovered that the TV was looking through the video input, which I had gone ahead and plugged in as well. Ah…now it was clear. I switched that setting to S-video and got out. Now, on the brand-new SVID channel, I had a crystal clear color image, but still no sound.<\/p>\n
So I started checking connections again. It was then that I decided to go up to channels 3 and 4 again to see if that had anything to do with it. (This was, I admit, a ludicrous idea, but at least it led me to the truth.) I had to go through the FRNT channel again to do this. But this time, I heard music. The Matrix<\/i> menu sequence music, to be precise. Now I had picture on one channel, and sound on another.<\/p>\n
I’m sure that everyone by now has figured out exactly what the FRNT channel corresponded to. I didn’t put two and two together, however. Instead, I just decided to switch the audio cables to the back, too. To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s reading this, it worked like a charm. It was only about ten minutes into the movie that the thought hit me: “Hey, the FRNT channel is for the front<\/b> input jacks!” I had a good laugh about it, if you can consider shamefully shaking your head back and forth while covering it with your hand while you laugh a good laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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