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All posts by Neil Bell

Below are all of Neil Bell's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Sunday 30 November 2014 11:30PM

I think jb38's toslink splitter looks the best bet because the headphone socket would be affected by the volume control.

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Monday 1 December 2014 2:15PM
Ilford

Hi David Ta for that
I Had a quick look at the HTML manual for your TV and as you were you won't need a D/A converter. You can find it on line:-

Audio cable connection

or on the iManual on your TV- Basic Operations, Using Other Devices, Audio Cable Connection

There is a headphone type socket at the lower centre of the back of your TV and you can use a cable with 3.5mm headphone type plug on one end and 2 phono plugs at the other end to plug in to your loop device. You then need to go in to the menu system to set it to Audio Out and to set the output to 'Fixed' for a line output or 'Variable' so the volume through your loop will be controlled by the TV remote.

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Thursday 4 December 2014 3:35PM
Ilford

Hi David Hobbs It seems as though you have it the wrong way round. The 3.5mm jack should be plugged in to the audio out socket on the lower centre back of the TV and the red & white phono plugs should be plugged in to the right & left line inputs on your loop box

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Friday 5 December 2014 6:57PM
Ilford

David its not an input you need but an output. If the manual is wrong and there is no audio out jack then use the headphone jack which can be set to fixed as well

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Sunday 7 December 2014 1:11AM
Ilford

David Hobbs I sympathise with you because the iManuals on Sony TVs use drawings rather than photos and they just indicate the general placement of inputs & outputs so you do have to look carefully. The headphone output socket on my older Sony TV is all black, has a 3.5mm hole and a small headphone symbol beside it.

You probably think I am a bit of a geek but the first thing I do when I buy a new piece of equipment is to take pictures of the back panel or at least the interesting bits including serial number, model name, inputs & outputs etc. so I can find things more easily later when its on a shelf and is not well illuminated. From the picture I took of the small panel where my headphone socket is before I installed the TV I now know exactly where it is even if I can't see it very clearly in situ. I also download where available the PDF manual but alas Sony no longer publish these but provide HTML manuals instead. With a PDF manual you can search the whole document for a word e.g. "headphone" or "audio" but with HTML you can only search the page you are on which is fairly useless.

Can you confirm that you clicked on the link for the HTML manual for your TV on Sony's website that I posted before? It definately shows a headphone type jack on a panel just above the foot of your TV. I've posted the link to the audio connection page again here:

Audio cable connection

If you don't have an audio out jack then the headphone socket is shown here:

Right

Good luck!

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Sunday 7 December 2014 2:52PM
Ilford

David Hobbs You mentioned before that your loop box was working with the internal tuner in your TV via SCART but was this a cable? and what was actually plugged in to the input of your loop box? Is the 3.5mm plug too big? Maplin do a 2.5mm stereo plug with a 3.5mm stereo socket on the back but I don't know if its a 2.5mm plug you need. The information I found online about your loop box didn't give any information on input sockets. Regards Neil

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Connecting it all up | Installing
Monday 8 December 2014 1:09PM
Ilford

MikeB From that picture it looks as though you have to have "outreach" connections to the loop box from wall plates which can have e.g. 2 phono sockets or microphone inputs etc which would make sense in a church or public hall where someone might want to plug an alternative audio source in to the system. It all seems rather over engineered however for a domestic situation such as David Hobb's where you would expect just an audio output from TV or HIFI. On the other hand presumably these loop systems are monaural rather than stereo and so you need some way of inputting both channels without shorting them out for hearing users. We don't know for sure if David Hobb's system is the same as that but I am interested to see how he gets on!
Regards Neil

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Feedback | Feedback
Thursday 1 January 2015 9:41PM
Ilford

David Some years ago when digital broadcasting started I was trying to work out why my roof top aerial was so poor. I hit upon the idea of using Google maps which had recently appeared. I zoomed in on the transmitter and then once found I zoomed out to include the area around my house. I then laid a ruler across my screen between my house & transmitter and zoomed in on my house, lined up my roof on the ruler on Google and then looked at what was also on the edge of the ruler in the vicinity. Realising that my roof aerial was pointing in the wrong direction explained the very poor signal but finding an old squirrel chewed aerial in my loft led me to try it out of my bedroom window where it worked perfectly. It also worked perfectly through the outside wall so I cleaned it up a bit, made a wooden bracket for it and stuck it in the loft where it remains working well to this day. I didn't actually need to print off a plan of the immediate area but it would surely be easy enough for you to do so and then to draw a line between your roof and the aiming point selected on Google.

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BBC Three week: the history of BBC Three
Monday 2 February 2015 9:00PM

Typos???

Critics would point to the unstable ....

should that be "unsuitability"??

and am attempt should be "an attempt"?

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Eric I have a Passion+ (and an older Passion) and neither have ever received Channel4 HD - I thought it was a known weakness.
My BBC1 HD reception is OK but my 3Sat HD is also jerky (3Sat SD is fine). I seem to have lost ITV1 HD completely on the Passion+ at present. I always wondered if these old boxes struggled with better quality transmissions. There is a huge difference for example between 3Sat SD (good) and ITV4 SD (poor) so maybe the HD channels vary similarly with the better transmissions being too much for the Passions to cope with?
I do most of my satellite viewing/recording now on a Panasonic DMR-BST700 Bluray recorder and it is in a different league with excellent reception on all channels/satellites so maybe you should think of upgrading?

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