Out With the Old, In With the New

 I took our old TV out to the junkyard today.  The new one is working fine and we don't have room in this house for two TVs.  I tried to find a good home for the old one, calling Goodwill, Habitat For Humanity, and the Salvation Army, but nobody wanted it.  It was still working last I knew, but it was getting glitchy so it was only a matter of time.  I would have felt better about it if my neighbor, who owns the junkyard, had told me to put it in one of his buildings, but they were all full so he told me to just leave it outside in the weather.  His son likes to tinker with electronics, so there is a chance he might pick it up before it rains or snows again.  If not, my neighbor will likely blast it with a shotgun so he can safely salvage the platinum from the picture tube.  Oh well, nothing lasts forever and life marches on.

The good news is I found a way to get more sound out of the DVD player.  The tip came from an unlikely source, Annie's Mailbox, which is the successor to the old Ann Landers column.  I don't know why I still read that thing, habit I guess.  I started reading Ann Landers when I was a little kid and, when she retired and a different Annie took it over, I just kept reading it.  Somebody had written in to complain that she was having a hard time hearing the dialog on her new TV because the music was too loud.  Annie told her to write to the stations about it, but another reader wrote in a few days later and suggested that she go into the settings and see if the TV was set up for stereo or mono.  They said there should be an option to choose stereo or mono and, if it was set to stereo and the TV didn't have stereo speakers, the TV might think that the dialog is going to another speaker.  Since I was only having trouble with the sound from my DVD player, I checked its settings and found that it was set to Dolby, which I knew was a form of stereo.  The other option was Bitmark, or something like that, which I assumed to be a form of mono.  I changed it to Bitmark and the sound is much better now.  The moral of the story is that good advice is where you find it.  It doesn't matter who said it as long as it works.