I am planning for a home remodeling project, and I am a little stumped about how to approach the TV tuner aspect of the new AV setup. I am hoping to have three stand-alone TV tuners at the home run location to tune in my cable TV. I have basic, analog cable, and I have no interest in digital cable or the cable company set-top boxes, since I do not wish to view the pay-per-view features or otherwise make use of the cable box. I do wish to have stand-alone tuners located at the home run location so that I can feed the tuned signal to my AV receivers.

I have been looking around for cheap, analog, stand-alone TV tuners to use, but I cannot find them on the internet. Ideally, I would like to find sub-$50, small, good quality tuners. Am I not approaching my tuner needs correctly? Are such tuners available? If not, should I be looking at purchasing (or renting) the cable set-top boxes?

Very confused. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Charlie

Buy a cheap VCR and use the internal tuner with the remote control to change the channels. RF in with a 75ohms coax and come out with a composite video signal (RCA Plug) to whereever you want to go with it.

J. Bond

J. Thanks for the suggestion. I have been considering this as well -- VCRs are very cheap and have full-featured tuners. It seems a shame to purchase the entire device to just use the tuner, but it would work well. I would think that there are very compact, decent quality tuners around, but it must be a very limited market.

Charlie

There are a few stand alone TV tuners, but look at the price:
[Link: shopping.com]

J. Bond

Correction:
[Link: shopping.com]

J. Bond

Yeah, it looks like most, if not all, of the models there are mobile tuners for cars and boats. Most of the other tuners I have run across are either car/boat models or are intended to be used with computer monitors, although they would probably work with a TV.

The VCR route might be the way to go -- I see cheap VCRs on eBay for $30.

Charlie

Why not use the tuners in the TV's then run audio out to your receivers??

That might be a good solution. It would require some long audio cable runs back to the receiver. Also, it introduces the issue of needing to change between the locally tuned cable TV and Input 1 (or whatever) on the TV in order to watch other sources (DVD, VCR, etc.), which is a little confusing for some of my family members.

Hmmm. I will need to think some more. Great ideas.

Charlie

Why do you want to have the tuners at the home run location? Seems like this would make the system difficult to use... you need to track which tuner is being used for what or by whom. You now have to use IR repeaters to get IR back to the tuners. You've also got some long runs for audio as well.

If you're set with your cables home run to a single location, just use a good quality splitter. No need to buy an amplifier. The cable company can even crank up the signal level into the home so that you are getting full signal strength with the split signal.

If you're doing some remodeling, I'd recommend future proofing your setup. HDTV is definitely here. Some cable companies use two cables. Also, satellite requires more than one cable for HD. If you're going to use TIVO, you need a cable. So... I'd recommend running at least 3 good quality RG6 cables to your home run location. Since you can get the RG6 with two cables bundled together, you can run two pairs of RG6, and have one leftover for things like a uplink back to a security video camera, baby monitor, etc. Think about running Network cable while you're at it.

I am new to designing a system like this, but my overall AV plans (which I didn't mention in my previous posts, and is the reason for my centralized tuner plan) include the desire to have the audio for the three tuners fed to my receivers, and then to have speaker wire fed back to speakers at each of the three TV locations. With that in mind, I assume that it is easiest to have the tuners at the home run location.

Thank you very much for your comments about running plenty of cable to the locations. I am still working on exact plans, but your enouragement to plan for the future is valued. Thanks too to the many others in this forum who take the time to make suggestions of planning for AV upgrades. I am a novice to creating a whole-house system, and my knowledge and comfort level in attempting a significant AV project have increased dramatically due to your contributions. I don't post much, but I read tons. Keep up the good work.

Charlie

I use these:

[Link: grand.com.tw]

Good suggestion. That would probably work very well.

Charlie

I do A/V system design and installation.

VCRs are irritating TV tuners as they do not have "Previous Channel" buttons.

I don't see the value of having the tuners in a central location. If you happen to use the same brand and model, which will make operation easier for everyone from room to room, having them all in the same closet will make IR control difficult. You have already mentioned the audio-cable distance issue.

The only way to put everything in the closet is to install ALL the cables you will EVER want from the rooms to the closet. That includes for technology that has not been invented yet.

And what do you do with your DVD? You don't want to have to go from each room to the closet to put in a DVD, right? And it has a digital audio output, which has to go to a receiver that can decode it, so that also has to home-run to the closet. All speaker wires will be unnecessarily long if done that way, too.

No, the thing to do is to decide what type of intercommunication you might EVER want to do from one system to another, and wire for that to a central location, but otherwise have the systems in the rooms in which they are to be used.

I would run three RG6 (I run two now for clients, but in my home, I would do three) and three CAT6 from each room's system location to the central closet.

I have done a house with three systems plus a whole-house two-channel audio system. Each room normally has one pair of speakers connected to the whole-house system Turning on the local system switches those speakers to the local system. The whole-house system can be turned on via a remote control from each room, or each room can turn on its own system and use it alone. DVD and satellite feeds from the living room system are available as modulated channels, as well (actually, we did RG59 video feeds to go along with whole-house audio of the TV programs, but this is less flexible than the modulated approach).

Ernie, thanks for your comments. My fairly modest budget for my project has led me to some of my tentative decisions -- I have written some additional thoughts below.


The VCR-as-a-tuner concept would not be ideal, but certainly cheap.


I will have a 2-zone IR repeater system, so I believe that I could accomodate two tuners of the same model by feeding the IR commands to a specific zone and then on to a specific tuner. For the third tuner, I am now thinking that maybe I could use the TV tuner, and run audio cables back to the receiver.


If things change dramatically in the future, I could change my setup to have local components and scrap my current arrangment.


It would be ideal to have three, self contained AV systems, but my budget makes this difficult. I believe that I can meet my current needs by sharing components from my AV closet.


Sounds like a great set-up. Again, my budget will not allow for separate systems in addition to a whole-house audio system and video modulation. My goal is to meet my current needs and not limit myself too much for my possible future needs, such as what you describe in your comment above. Hopefully be stringing plenty of cable, I can get by for quite a while.

Cheers. Charlie