Assuming that the station has their Dolby Digital 5.1 encoder setup properly. The amount of sound present in the surround channels probably is mostly due to the skill of the audio engineer in the truck and how much surround the director / producer wants in the production.

One point I forgot...when I say the there are no functional differences between the later DCT, DCH, and now DCX STBs that is in relation to the commonly deployed cable architecture. Yes, the DCX supports "MPEG-4" and "1Ghz Tuning" but all the current deployments are MPEG-2 and 860Mhz tuning, so no difference. Yes, there maybe aesthetic differences between the models that make them more attractive in your rack but hey if you wanted pretty you wouldn't have the Cable Company DVR anyway...

Ben, I wanted to take an opportunity to give you my insights as to why Cable Company, Telco, and Satellite DVRs have such little disk space.

Your right, it's not due to cost. What it has everything to do with is STANDARDIZATION.

1.) The cable company does not want to have to stock multiple DVR models with multiple size hard disks in each particular model. It's just a way to keep their costs and complexity down. Comcast for example only wants to have three kind of STBs in inventory. An SD Box, and HD Box, and a SD/HD DVR. They just want the tech or customer service rep (depending if they rolled a truck or you showed up at the service center) to be able to go to one shelf and get the right device without having to worry about how much storage they need to give you. It just makes things simpler.

2. Okay, and then your next question would logically be. Alright so the cable company doesn't want to carry three models of DVRs. So why do they purchase the model with the smallest harddrive and that falls into the realm of customer psychology. One only has to check the local HDTV forums at AVSforum.com to see the problem. When a new STB is announced, the forums come alive with "Hey, is Comcast offering the new Motorola DVR yet? If so, how can I demand that they give me one because the one I currently have sucks." Now, from a hardware point of view, there is really no "functional" difference between say the DCT-6412 Phase III models to the new DCX models in the Motorola World. They all have the same necessary features. An HDMI port and a eSATA port for storage expansion. They all run the same sucky ass iGuide software and they all work exactly the same. But those facts have not stopped those pathetic morons from demanding that Comcast give them the latest and greatest box.

Now imagine what will happen if say tomorrow Comcast decides that they will now only deploy the DCX-x432 DVR. 320GB of space (the average Comcast DVR is in the 120GB-160GB). Once that news gets out on the Internet, Comcast will have their customer services lines melted down and lines outside of their service centers with all the AVS-gotta-have-the-newest-geeks calling and walking up DEMANDING that Comcast replace their functioning DVR with the DCX model with more storage. There is no way Comcast will have enough of those boxes to go around and they will end up with a bunch of pissed off customers. So, the idea is to only buy DVRs with bigger hard drives when you can no longer get the ones you have been buying and then only buy the smallest unit so you don't have to replace every DVR you deployed.

I had three Comcast DVRs before I got my Vista Media Center.

DCT-6208 (80GB)
DCT-6412 Phase III (120GB)
DCT-3412 (120GB)

I understand the commonly deployed model is now the DCH-x416 (with the "x" either being a 3 for a digital only box or 6 for a analog/digital box) which is a 160GB unit. I believe the x416 is now the smallest model Motorola makes. So hard drive sizes are increasing, but they only increase slowly as to make the "enthusiast" customer not to want to bother with an upgrade. (as going from 120GB to 160GB only gives you 4 more hours of HD).

Now if you are looking for a conspiracy, ask why the eSATA ports still aren't active on those DVRs. Beyond the craptacular iGuide software, that is.

Oh, and I have mentioned how much I hate iGuide?

If you read the post you would know Engadget is not against ala carte. What they (and I) are pointing out is that suing the cable company isn't the right approach. The cable company is the middleman in the transaction. The reason you have to pay for 5 ESPNs when you only want ESPN1 and ESPN2 is because the channels are bundled by the content provider (Disney). Disney is the one you need to sue. Every middleman (Cable, Telco, and Satellite) all play by the same rules and that is why none of them offer ala carte.

This is as silly as suing the Cable Company because STBs are not available for retail. (And the reason they aren't sold at retail is because no retailer wants to deal with the hassle and the two STB manufacturers are interested in selling them at retail due to the support costs.)

Well the biggest reason why these lawsuits never work is because the American Public sues THE WRONG ENTITY. Talk about not seeing the forest from the trees. If you want ala carte programming you need to start suing the Time-Warners, NBC Universals (before Comcast buys them), and Disney. It's like suing Target because you don't like the way Coke packages their beverages.

Lame, Lame, Lame. I would be very surprised the Cable Companies had anything to do with this. They had to be on board with DIY, SDV, and relaxed-ever-so-slightly DRM for Microsoft to make the announcement at CEDIA. It wouldn't stop the firmware update This sounds like a less second show stopping bug that they thought might have been fixed by now. Doesn't sound like the coders made it.

No new date isn't a surprise. If you had Microsoft's history of not making announced dates, you wouldn't announce any dates either.

Kludgey, Kludgey, Kludgey. That's what you want in something that is supposed to be an appliance (ala Tivo), more background services, the whole SageTV application running, most of the Media Center (everything other than eshell.exe) application running, and some homegrown code to duct tape the entire mess together. I suppose this doesn't work with Live TV, does it? And I would also assume that Media Center only handles the Cablecard recordings and SageTV handles everything else (analog cable, ClearQAM, ATSC)? I can only imagine the software dependencies that is going to come with this.

And we wonder why HTPCs haven't had greater penetration that they do.

Here is one case where the HD-PVR would probably be a better bet and just let SageTV do the whole thing.

No HD, No Extender, only useful if I for some reason want to watch a movie on the 19" LCD display connected to a Media Center or on my Slingbox. Lame.

Now c'mon? Really? Of course that is what it is.

Huh? I have never seen a cablebox that is configures itself. Every system I have been on the tech has to either call in the number or use a PDA to do it himself. It's possible on a new install that the tech preconfigured a box to an account back at the office but that isn't the same as self configuring.