Home cinema - Rigger's Diary -- and audio problems on a PC

Hilary is in hospital. She's been there for two weeks now. She picked
up a virus which attacked her lungs and heart. It was pretty scary for
a while but now she's on the mend. It's astonishing that you can
breathe in something that will give one person mild flu symptoms (me)
and cause a serious illness (Hil). Anyway, it looks as if we're over
the worst, but she's going to be convalescing for some time.

I've had a pretty strange time. Apart from being frightened witless
I've had to learn new things. And of course this is pretty daunting
when your few remaining brain cells are pickled. I've mastered the
basic functions of the microwave, and I've learnt that you put the
clothes in the left hand washing machine first, along with some soapy
stuff, then you take them out and put them in the right hand machine,
which dries them. Never put the dirty clothes and the soapy stuff in
the right hand machine. I've found out how to pay bills, send
invoices, send parcels, pay money into the bank, and operate a vacuum
cleaner. The vac turns out to be a bright purple plastic device, very
heavy, and full of basic design faults it seems to me. I've never
noticed it before, although I have heard her grunting a bit when
she's been dragging it upstairs.

I've learnt how to clean up cat ****. Not to a hygienic level of
course, just enough so it doesn't get walked all over the house. Oh,
and how to put a boot up the cat's arse so that it lands at the end
of the yard. My cat might be retarded and unable to speak, yet she can
describe a trajectory.

I've learn how to be alone. For the first time in my life I'm
'home alone'. At first it freaked me out but now I've come to
quite enjoy the peace and quiet. I never thought I would.

Parking appeared to be a problem at the hospital, with queues and
furious battles between parkers over spaces. On the first day, when I
was beside myself with worry, a man in a small white van came close to
attacking me because I parked in a space that he perceived (from 100
yards away) to be his own. The fee is 70p per hour, and that's a lot
when you're there seven hours a day as I have been. I had a look at
the aerial photographs and the large scale maps, and went around the
area on foot having a look round. Since then I've not paid to park
and I haven't been a victim of car park rage. Incredibly, there's a
large underground staff car park that is open to the public from 6pm to
8am, and this is free of charge. It's never more than half full, yet
there's a large sign pointing to it. Just above, people are battling
to park and pay their 70p. There are lots of gaps in the yellow lines
in the surrounding streets, and the hospital works department has a
large car park that has no 'bugger off outsiders' notices. The
perimeter road has free parking all along one side.

The hospital has one of these TV systems where the patients have to pay
£40 per week. It's a total rip-off and I'm disgusted, and Hil
wasn't prepared to pay it. Even in extremis she was belligerent.
That's my girl! The hospital has banned patients' own TV sets and
removed the normal ward TVs, allegedly on safety grounds, but we all
know the real reason. It's the same with mobile phones. Security are
walking round with UHF handsets, the consultants are always on their
mobiles, yet the patients can't use theirs because 'it might upset
medical equipment'. ********. They can't ban DVD players that
operate from batteries though, so I bought one. A fine little gadget, a
Philips that cost £150. It's self-contained and plays DVDs and CDs.
So I had to find out how to get all the soaps onto DVD.

As luck would have it we've just started replacing our computers. We
now have a laptop that can miraculously operate like one of the office
machines, even down to printing and emailing. It works in the bog and
up the yard, everywhere! More to the point, we also have an imposing
thing with a silver box and a flat screen. This machine does
everything, apparently. Paul went out and bought some blank DVDs and we
set out to record Corrie and Emmie. The first problem was remembering
to capture the broadcast. Paul has a Sky+ box upstairs that feeds into
the house RF system, so set it to record every episode of the relevant
trash automatically. I plugged the aerial lead into the new whizzbang
machine and fiddled with something called Compro PVR2. This tuned in
the Sky+ box and recorded it, but the picture and sound quality were
poor. We ran a great long scart lead through the house and set the
Compro PVR2 to composite input. Much better, but the sound was still
slightly distorted. I put a DTT box next to the computer and used that
but the sound was still rather poor. Nothing terrible, just a slight
bit of distortion. A lot of people wouldn't notice it, but it jarred
with me. The Emmerdale music showed up the fault. I tried altering the
audio level from the source and also on the computer but I soon
realised that this distortion was independent of amplitude. Very odd.
Now the arrangement when recording from the composite input is that the
audio is connected into the TV card ''aux in' socket and a
patchcord takes it from the TV card's 'aux out' socket to the
sound card's 'aux in' socket. So I plugged the DTT box's audio
output directly into the sound card and the distortion was gone. It was
perfect. But this isn't convenient of course. I'm wondering if
anyone can suggest what I might be doing wrong here. The odd thing is
that the sound from the FM radio part of the TV card is fine. I've
tried altering the various settings on the Compro and the Windows
audio, without success. Maybe the TV card is faulty. All suggestions
gratefully received. I'm recording using Nero, by the way.

Actually, the TV card is definitely faulty in another respect. The
sound from the built-in UHF tuner is OK (apart from the distortion)
when the signal is from an in-house channel, but when it's from a
broadcast channel there's a loud hiss. In my opinion the cause is the
presence of the nicam carrier. I think this is a US product that
hasn't been tested in Europe. It claims to adjust the intercarrier
sound frequency but it doesn't. The teletext is clunky.

Anyway, we've managed to deliver a DVD containing the best of last
night's TV to Hil every day for a fortnight now. The technical
quality has gradually improved! Hil sits up in bed with her cans on and
enjoys her soaps, and ******** to Patientline!

Sorry this has been a long ramble. There a quite a few different
issues, and I'd welcome comments on them all. If anyone can clarify
the computer audio situation I'd be especially grateful. Computers
and me have a sort of mutual incomprehension. The last time I had this
feeling was in 1963 when Mr Willox introduced me to algebra.

Bill