Will Either of these Cable Boxes work on my Analog Set?

[mwplefty]

Originally Posted by Dave A

MW,

Your VCR probably only has an ATSC tuner for over-the-air and a NTSC tuner for the now-gone cable world giving you the 2-19 world. Cable clear channels are QAM which is probably in your set tuner along with the NTSC/ATSC tuner when you bypass the VCR giving you the upper channels. VCR tuner fair, set tuner better. And the added few analog channels still sent by cable will appear.

My Phila Comcast system is mostly digital but the locals are still analog and QAM HD, including sub-channels, (very good compared to what a digi box does to the signal in pure digital) and a bunch of useless other channels in NTSC. I do get a bunch of music channels though. All this on a Sony XBR960 HD glass set with the NTSC/ATSC and clear-QAM tuner via the basic Comcast delivery to that set.

All that said, I have the Comcast mini-box on my other two relics. They do look ok but the audio is low on both.

Actually, I scanned for channels on the VCR when it was set to "CATV" and got channels 2-31, 70, 96, and 98.

My neighbors recently talked about how they no longer receive channels 2-99 with basic cable (They only got about 15 channels or so). They had to buy a separate box in order to get the additional channels.

Could this be why I'm only getting a certain amount of channels? Do I need that digital cable converter box to get all channels 2-99 now?


Either way, I'm pretty glad this VCR of mine still works. Even though we've had it for about 12 years, I can't remember that many times using it. Therefore, for a while, I thought it was broken and useless. I'm happy that I was wrong.