[jbeary]

Wow. Thank you Chris, I think that you explained a lot of what I just did not know. Every single TV in our house aside from the JVC I bought in college are tube based. I've been using these old Tocom boxes, thinking it's great because they have a volume control. What I didn't know was that at some point, the cable company started treating any channel over 70 as something different. The Tocom boxes do not tune channel 88 like the early 90's JVC does. I've been thinking that I'd just get a frequency agile modulator and a low pass filter and modulate the SDTV signal from the cheap digital tuner that I bought with my government coupon over channel 88 or something. What a pain, so of course I hooked it up to the cable where it tuned nothing. When my parents bought a new Sony, all they did was to hook it up to cable and they not only got all of the regular cable channels they got on their old Sony, they also got the "HDTV" channels and they intermediary channels. This is exactly what I wanted and if the older model DirecTV boxes that litter the Goodwill Store won't work, it sounds like the Samsung tuners would also work, but at $150 a pop, I'd have to start saving now to afford one for every TV in the house.

Thanks again, you guys have helped me understand.