Home Theatre - sort of

Posted by: Jez Quigley on 25 April 2001

I have a Dell laptop with DVD, s-video and digital audio out. I tried to connect it to my Naim amps and my TV. Composite video works fine as does the sound (I'll get a suitable cable to connect the digital output to my Linn DAC later), but the picture on the TV from s-video is monochrome. I've tried every which way with the laptop and TV display settings e.g. setting it to PAL etc, but with no luck. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

The cable I'm using has an s-video plug at the laptop end and a Scart at the TV end (it also has composite video and analogue sound connectors which as I say work fine)and is sold as a 'PC DVD to TV' cable.

Posted on: 26 April 2001 by Martin Payne
Jez,

S-Video carries the colour (chrominance) info on a separate wire to the b/w (luminance). Composite mixes the two onto the same wire (thus the name). A third wiring standard is RGB - separate wires for the three separate colours.

With my Sony TV I have to make a selection on my SCART input as to which input type it should accept.

SCART1 can select either composite or RGB.

SCART2 can select either composite or S-Video.

cheers, Martin

Posted on: 26 April 2001 by Jez Quigley
for that, I know nothing of these things but I had the notion that the colour signal wasnt connected to the right scart pin or something. There are two scart sockets on the tv, I will try swapping between them, and looking in the tv menus for any settings to try.
Posted on: 27 April 2001 by Jez Quigley
I tried the other scart with no luck. It looks like neither of them will accept s-video signals, so I'm stuck with composite unless anyone knows a way around this. Anyhow I'm going to get a bnc>phono lead today so that I can connect the digital sound out to the Linn Numeric DAC.

Whilst I was fiddling with the connections I fired up Quake III through the TV and Naim amps - awesome!

Posted on: 02 June 2001 by Jez Quigley
I told someone in a shop today about my problems connecting the laptop DVD to the TV/Naim. He told me that I should set my TV to 'E1-s' and that would play s-video. I told him that I didn't have a 'E1-s' only AV1, AV2, and AV25. As soon as I said it I realised that the 25 is in fact 2S - How stupid can I be?
I also had a Linn digital interconnect made up to connect the Numerik to the Laptop digital out. Absolutely f*in awesome sound now!