S
Steven Rogers
Guest
Original poster
Well, I did a lot of looking at Dish versus DirecTV and finally settled
on Dish. They're very nearly the same in many ways, (e.g. having
separate HD boxes, needing different antennas with multiple LNBs for
different services, etc). I picked Dish mostly because they have a box
with 2 tuners that allows me to run a 2nd TV on another channel without
an additional room fee. I have a little desktop TV in a room that
shares a wall with the main TV, and already had RCA cables passed
through so its just a little extra convenience to have two channels.
Its really not bad, per se, but it sure makes you appreciate Voom.
The Dish box just has RCA audio and video out for the two tuners (or
RF, you want a really crappy picture) and one of the tuners has S-video
out, but not both. No digital optical audio out like the voom box. I
got it on Monday, and the box has crashed once so far - so not
particularly better or worse than Voom in that regard. The Dish remote
won't work with my TV, which is annoying, and the design of the Dish
remote in general is annoying. The "mute" button on the remote is
designed to mute your TV/amp, not the output of the box itself. Of
course, I should be able to program it to work with my Sony amp, but so
far no luck.
The guide is pretty nice, and the "infrastructure" is clearly more
sophisticated. More options in terms of controls and timers, ways to
pay bills and buy programming directly on the box, etc. It doesn't look
as clean as the Voom menu - probably because the text has to be larger
because its designed to run on SD TVs. The volume from channel to
channel seems more uniform on Dish - Voom never really got that nailed.
But it could be because Voom was running more audio formats.
The picture quality is not bad - better than cable - but it is no Voom,
that's for sure. For example, on TCM, the picture is some off-tint
rather than pure black and white. Voom was like that early on, but they
fixed it. There's also often little color flecks mixed in. The picture
also just seems generally a bit more compressed. The most striking
difference to me is the audio - Voom was really much better there, even
on the SD channels.
The Dish installer wanted to use the cable from my Voom install, but I
made him leave it up. Maybe the locals will continue to work - maybe
Echostar will broadcast something over it . . . who knows.
Regarding what happened to Voom and why, the guy who installed my
system is a professional installer, and had only a vague notion of
Voom's existence. He'd never installed or seen it, and didn't know they
were croaking. The local satellite people I talked with that handle
Dish and DirecTV all thought Voom was bad (primarily because it didn't
have a lot of channels). If you don't get the people out in the field
who are meeting the public on your side, you are doomed.
SR
------------------------
on Dish. They're very nearly the same in many ways, (e.g. having
separate HD boxes, needing different antennas with multiple LNBs for
different services, etc). I picked Dish mostly because they have a box
with 2 tuners that allows me to run a 2nd TV on another channel without
an additional room fee. I have a little desktop TV in a room that
shares a wall with the main TV, and already had RCA cables passed
through so its just a little extra convenience to have two channels.
Its really not bad, per se, but it sure makes you appreciate Voom.
The Dish box just has RCA audio and video out for the two tuners (or
RF, you want a really crappy picture) and one of the tuners has S-video
out, but not both. No digital optical audio out like the voom box. I
got it on Monday, and the box has crashed once so far - so not
particularly better or worse than Voom in that regard. The Dish remote
won't work with my TV, which is annoying, and the design of the Dish
remote in general is annoying. The "mute" button on the remote is
designed to mute your TV/amp, not the output of the box itself. Of
course, I should be able to program it to work with my Sony amp, but so
far no luck.
The guide is pretty nice, and the "infrastructure" is clearly more
sophisticated. More options in terms of controls and timers, ways to
pay bills and buy programming directly on the box, etc. It doesn't look
as clean as the Voom menu - probably because the text has to be larger
because its designed to run on SD TVs. The volume from channel to
channel seems more uniform on Dish - Voom never really got that nailed.
But it could be because Voom was running more audio formats.
The picture quality is not bad - better than cable - but it is no Voom,
that's for sure. For example, on TCM, the picture is some off-tint
rather than pure black and white. Voom was like that early on, but they
fixed it. There's also often little color flecks mixed in. The picture
also just seems generally a bit more compressed. The most striking
difference to me is the audio - Voom was really much better there, even
on the SD channels.
The Dish installer wanted to use the cable from my Voom install, but I
made him leave it up. Maybe the locals will continue to work - maybe
Echostar will broadcast something over it . . . who knows.
Regarding what happened to Voom and why, the guy who installed my
system is a professional installer, and had only a vague notion of
Voom's existence. He'd never installed or seen it, and didn't know they
were croaking. The local satellite people I talked with that handle
Dish and DirecTV all thought Voom was bad (primarily because it didn't
have a lot of channels). If you don't get the people out in the field
who are meeting the public on your side, you are doomed.
SR
------------------------
