Samsung SIR-TS160 Multiple Platform DirectTV Receiver
So much more than I expected from DirecTV.
When I upgraded my DirecTV account from standard to HD, I bought their $399 upgrade package, which included the triple LNB dish, the installation &amp; a new HD-capable receiver. I was unable to find out beforehand what kind of receiver I would be getting, but when the TS160 was FedEx'ed to my home (with Saturday delivery, no less!), I was pretty darned pleased. Installation was quick and neat and that same evening I began on the far left side of the learning curve by actually reading the manual first (a trick I had recently learned from having misused my Samsung 931 DVD player for a solid month).<BR>The features of this machine are nothing short of Swiss Army Knife diversity. Audio and video outputs are, in a word, complete. In my own setup, I use the DVI output at 1080i and the optical audio out.<BR>The guide is just plain impressive. Nevermind its high-tech appearance (there's this little spindle over the guide that just hovers over the current time, slowly making its way to the right as time passes; I don't know why it fascinates me, but it does), it is flat-out faster than anything you have ever seen in a guide and offers more search parameters than you've ever imagined.<BR>Setup fairly neatly scanned all available channels, both those received via satellite and those received over the air, and indexed them accordingly. Granted, some things it grabbed as channels were junk and needed to be removed from the memory, but this was a snap to do.<BR>Despite that little annoyance, what I see as the best feature is the awesome OTA tuning. I have a so-called 160 mile, chimney-mounted antennna on a 20' pole with directional tuning (this has a lot to do with the Saints) that until the TS160 arrived was attached to a Motorola HD receiver from VOOM. I got 3 to 4 local channels OTA on the Motorola, and these were iffy. Simply unscrewing the antenna input from the Motorola and attaching it to the Samsung yielded 27 crystal clear &quot;local&quot; channels, some from as far as100 miles away! <BR>Needless to say, I am really happy with my Samsung TS160, and I can even be heard speaking fondly of DirecTV these days. When new technology performs the way it's supposed to, life just seems grand.