The Curious Case of the Cable
I’ve been trying to review an AVerMedia Duet dual-tuner x1 PCIe tuner card all week. God has it been tough. The darn thing kept acquiring only four digital channels and I have 21 available on my Hauppauge HVR-2250. I tried everything –new drivers, rescanning, prayer, hopping on one leg while waving a rubber chicken over my head… Nothing worked. I always got the same four channels.
In desperation, I had AVerMedia send me another card to rule out a hardware defect on the one I was using. Shazaam! Same thing!!!!!!!!
Background: The AVer TVHD Duet needs a an analog card installed for Vista or XP. To do that, I got a Cablevision approved 1:2 splitter and I purchased two cables from Radio Shack. One was a house brand and the other was a Monster cable (the one used to connect the AVer card) . The TVHD Duet reacted the same way –every time– under those connection conditions.
I was ready to slam the card and then a thought occurred to me. (They sometimes do.) I had already tested it under XP, Vista, and Windows 7. According to AVerMedia, in Window 7 it doesn’t need a companion analog card. So I pulled it. Things were till the same.
Then I pulled the splitter and the cables and connected the card directly to the line. Life suddenly became wonderful. Media Center found all 21 channels automatically, the picture was crystal clear, and I could watch one channel while recording another. (Apparently a high priority in America today.)
I haven’t had a chance to determine if it was the splitter or the Monster cable yet. Gut instinct says it’s probably the Monster cable because the analog card reception stayed the same but that’s not a conclusion –just an assumption. I’ll update if I have the time.
The bottom line here, however, is don’t be quick to blame the hardware and defintiely don’t pull out your gun and shoot holes in it unless you’ve tried everything possible to eliminate the problem.