The Dish receiver arrived today. After unpacking it I realized that I need to buy YAC (Yet Another Cable). Actually, make that two. The first cable is HDMI –> HDMI. That goes from the Dish receiver to the TV and carries digital sound and video. It didn’t come in the box with the receiver which gives me an idea of how much it costs. The odd part is that I’ll only be using half of the cable. I won’t be using the audio part because I use a separate amplifier to connect to the speakers. So I need YAC for the sound part. That one’s a standard optical cable (though I may buy one that comes with the tips to fit into a headphone-type jack because I broke one of them off accidently the other day on the cable from the Airport Express to the amplifier and had to use the spare). Had I spent another $300 on a receiver that had an HDMI input, I could save a couple bucks now. I think I made a good choice — the cable is less than $30.
I attempted to install the Dish receiver myself. The official Dish Guy doesn’t arrive for two more weeks, but they went ahead and shipped the receiver early. And how am I not supposed to try installing it with that kind of wait? A few problems though. The most obvious is that I’m missing all the cables that I need to make the fancy connections. I tried using the ones they included (3 x RCA — R, L, Video) and got an image. But when I connected what I thought was the feed from the satellite dish, I ended up with what was probably a huge ground loop. It made my subwoofer hum and the video image shake. Not pretty. So, after searching for signal twice, I gave up. Besides, with two weeks to spare, maybe I can save a couple bucks and order the cables over the internet.