I just can’t have nice things. Need proof? In the space of the past four weeks week, all of the following has happened:
- My region-free, Macrovision-free DVD player has stopped playing…well…much of anything. Burned discs. Store-bought discs. International discs. Domestic discs. Stuff that it played just fine a couple of weeks ago. Nothin’.
- My A/V amp has stopped outputting any kind of video. Making it more of an A amp since it’s not giving me much V, now is it?
- My main monitor, which is admittedly 20 years old but also has the throughput port that feeds video to the LCD video monitor on my desk, has started going on the fritz. Sometimes it’ll show you a nice bright picture. Sometimes a dim picture, like all of the video levels have been sawed in half. Sometimes nothing.
To put it mildly, this series of system failures completely sucks. When I set up my game room in late 2003/early 2004, I had carefully mapped out where everything needed to go to connect to stuff and do the things I wanted it to do. Just diagramming all that out – normally I don’t get that elaborate – took at least a couple of weeks. The idea was that this time I was going to Do It Right, and not have to mess with it again. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.
The DVD player business I find particularly disturbing. I have a region-free, Macrovision-free player for a reason, and contrary to what the manufacturers and studios think, it doesn’t have anything to do with rampant piracy of their content. In the years since I got this modified player (in 2002), it has become next-to-impossible to find these puppies. The amp, which I’ve had since 1999, has never shown this kind of flakiness before, so that too is disturbing (especially since it drives my entire A/V and gaming setup). The monitor is kind of a big blow, but I have an identical twin backup for that particular piece of equipment.
What I can’t figure out is why it all seems to be happening at once. The DVD player started going on the blink a few weeks ago; the amp and monitor problems began in the past few days. I can’t find any evidence of a voltage problem, and what’s more, those two items aren’t even plugged into the same strip or outlet. And it’s a depressing problem because they just don’t make stuff like they used to. They don’t make these DVD players like they used to just a few years ago, and they don’t make these broadcast monitors with signal throughput and selectable PAL output like they used to. Well, okay, they do make those. They just make them at broadcast prices that I can ill afford on broadcast wages.
Oh, to have everything working again like normal. And it used to be such a nice setup. Now I have to start tearing it apart, bit by bit, trying to find the culprit.
One of my TVs broke recently. So I guess I have YOU to blame for this !
🙂
I know how you feel about all of this. I’ve had multiple things break in a short period and it can be depressing. Sometimes I lapse into a fit of self-indulgence and lament the ineveitable heat-death of the universe. Then I move on and deal with the loss. Many times I find a replacement that was even better than the original and I get over the original loss. It doesn’t always happen. My first Atari ST died a long time ago and I still mourn it’s loss. Sure I got a new ST ( and even an STe) to replace it but it wasn’t the same. All those hours spent on that machine and now it’s gone. *sniff*
I literally dreamed an way to test my amp for video output, and woke up and put it into action. The good news: my ingenious testing method worked perfectly. The bad news: my amp is not processing or outputting a video signal at all. So this is likely a failure somewhere at the chip level that I can’t do anything about. (Wires, plugs and jacks, I can fix. Chips…if they’re not the kind I can eat, I’m outta luck.)
My wife has graciously offered to swap amps with me, since she rarely fires hers up. I guess that is this weekend’s project. Unhooking and rehooking everything without losing track of what’s what…now that is, as my niece would say, BIG FUN!