All Cabled Up

My 360 audio dongle arrived today, and I've just plumbed it in - HDMI and optical audio living side by side in perfect harmony! Wonderful.

I also indulged in a Nintendo component cable for the Wii, rather than using SCART. Although it produces a 480 line picture as opposed to SCART's 576 lines, it is progressive scan so looks lovely and crisp. The step up in quality from composite to RGB SCART was good, but this is a step further - pretty much as good as you're going to get from a humble standard def Wii.

So there you have it - all cables now in place, and raring and ready to go. I had a bit of a fight with my Harmony universal remote to make it work with all this new kit, but I've cracked it now.

With the exception of swapping out the HDMI lead that came in the box with the DVD player for something a bit better, I think that's it for cables and interconnects now. Good job.

Optical Illusion

I've just been on the mighty fleabay and got hold of an official Microsoft audio dongle so that I can use both HDMI and optical digital outputs of my Xbox 360. Bizarrely, Microsoft have opted to have the optical out built into the AV lead rather than the Xbox itself. There is an optical audio output built into the standard component hi-def lead which comes in the box, and there's even one on the SCART lead, but if you opt for HDMI then you're scuppered. Weird. Obviously it's not an issue if you're plugging the HDMI into an AV receiver that accepts audio over HDMI, but I'm not. I still need "old-fashioned" optical. And the other thing is Microsoft bundles the dongle with the top-of-the-range 360 Elite, but not with the lower models, meaning you have to shell out extra. Typical.

Anyway, it is bought now, so I'm looking forward to an HD picture and 5.1 Dolby Digital any day now.