Why Digital Satellite Deserves Special Treatment

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Connections Tips by Noel Lee

These articles are an excellent read for Home AV enthusiasts who want to take their system to the next level. Written by the Head Monster - Noel Lee.
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Why Digital Satellite Deserves Special Treatment

Direct Broadcast Satellite services like DirecTV and the DISH Network are one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. Between them, over ten million homes subscribe to one of these two services as either a supplement or alternative to cable TV. Leading consumer electronics manufacturers market the 18" dishes and digital satellite receivers, and virtually every major consumer electronics retailer that sells video also sells the hardware for at least one of these two systems.

The reasons why DBS is so popular are clear. The programming is great, and the picture and sound are truly outstanding. And with both systems incorporating state of the art satellite uplink technology, it's now the highest-quality video source you can get for your home.

The Most Critical Connection
With a DBS system, there are two critical connections. The most critical connection, the one between the receiver and your TV set, is the one where many people make the mistake of using RF coax cable. But this problem is easy to correct, because there are certain cables you can use to get high quality pictures from DBS. Your best choice is a Monster S-video cable, which you can and should use if your TV has an S-video input. S-video cable carries the color and brightness signals on separate lines, so your TV doesn't have to do the extra work of separating them. Because DBS receivers work with digital video signals, they produce a virtually perfect separation of color and brightness signals. So, if you use Monster S-video cable with your DirecTV or DISH receiver, you'll get the best possible picture your TV can reproduce. This means almost no dot crawl or hanging dots (the annoying, crawling edges you might notice on horizontal and vertical edges of colored objects in the picture).

If your TV doesn't have an S-video input, you can get almost as good a picture by using Monster composite video cable. Composite video cables offer the same resolution as S-video cables, but carry the color and brightness signals mixed together, so your TV has to separate them. A few of today's best TVs do a beautiful job here, in which case composite cable will work about as well as S-video cable. If the TV doesn't have a very good color/brightness separator, you will get some dot crawl and hanging dots with composite cable, but the picture will still be far better than what you'd get with RF cable.

The Second Most Critical Connection

The second most critical connection is between the satellite dish and receiver. Whether you're installing it yourself, or having a pro do it, make sure that you use cables made specifically for satellite dish installation, not the regular ones used for cable TV. This will ensure that you'll get the strongest possible signal delivered from the dish to the receiver.

Both DirecTV and DISH offer outstanding digital sound that's miles beyond anything you can get out of cable TV. And just as it's vitally important to use high-quality audio interconnect cables with digital sources like CD and DVD players, you should use nothing less than top-quality interconnects, such as Monster Cable, to realize the full potential of satellite TV sound. If you're a DirecTV subscriber, you may have noticed that many of the pay-per-view movies and events are being broadcast in 5.1 channel Dolby Digital. Beginning with one of the feeds of the STARZ movie channel in mid-1999, more and more regular programming airs in Dolby Digital sound as well. Use Monster interconnects to connect the audio outputs of the satellite receiver to your A/V receiver or Dolby Digital processor/preamp, including our TosLink cable for Dolby Digital on select DirecTV receivers, and you'll get the best sound your system can produce.