Missives from the 6th Floor

So it should surprise no one reading that this all leads up to my acquiring an XBox 360 the other day. It's a work expense (technically I'm not buying it, they are) - but never-the-less, the temperature in hell just dropped several more degrees.

We got it home on Sunday and I didn't make time to take it out of the box, but before I could submit the expense, I wanted to make sure the unit wasn't DOA, so last night I grabbed a packing knife and extricated the device from it's hermetically sealed plastic bubble.

It was no more difficult to open than the typical consumer electronic device. The unboxing experience was painless, and the first-glance ergonomics of the device aren't bad. I've used a 360 briefly a couple of times, so I wasn't going in completely unprepared, but I'd never hooked one up, so I figured that's where it would get interesting.

My first observation was that they clearly didn't think carefully through all the use-cases when designing the included A/V cable. It goes from a custom connector to a single thick wire that bifurcates 8-12" from the other end into two wires, each fanning into three male RCA jacks. One set is stereo audio and composite video, the other is component video (no HDMI, wtf?).

For anyone with a home theater receiver older than a couple years (me) and an HD set (also me), this presents a problem. The audio out needs to go to a completely different place than the component video. And this cable isn't like older cables that had a nice press-seam in the middle that you could just pull apart.

It wouldn't have been hard to avoid this problem - just make the two cables emerge from the custom connector and wrap them in several (8-12 should do) captive plastic or rubber bands that the consumer could slide along the cable length. Want them to run together? Space the bands out evenly. Want them to diverge early? Slide all the bands toward the box end. But they didn't - so now I have two choices: 1. Run the audio to the TV and use only the stereo TV speakers, or 2. Get some RCA splice plugs, run the cable out of the av cabinet, then splice on another bit of RCA to get the audio back into the cabinet and into the receiver.

Well, actually, I have a third choice - I can use the digital audio out from the device. I'm sure it has one, though I didn't notice it on initial inspection. Checking the hookup guide, sure enough, there's digital out on the custom A/V connector, but for reasons I can't imagine, they made it TOSLink (optical) rather than S/PDIF (copper).

I'm not a fan of TOSLink - it has several disadvantages when compared with S/PDIF. For one, optical cables are freaking expensive, and the cost increases non-linearly with length. For another, they're fragile -- too sharp a bend, or a momentary pinch, and you've killed the cable.

"Real audiophiles" seem to love TOSLink, however, for reasons I put in the same camp as being able to distinguish normal cables from 'Monster Cables with virginal platinum connectors'. (i.e. self-deluding nonsense).

Fortunately, you can have your cake and eat it too. You put a S/PIDF connector on the device, and folks who want TOSLink can buy a copper-to-fiber converter. The rest of us, who understand that bits-are-bits, regardless of the transmission medium, we live with copper and have longer, less fragile, and inexpensive cables.

I can't really fault them for TOS-Link, they had a 50/50 shot and were bound to piss off half their customers either way, though adding both wouldn't be unimaginable - my CD player and DVD player have both, and together they cost a fraction of the XBox.

Anyway, I don't have a TOSLink cable laying around, so getting digital audio out is a non-starter, and now I'm just annoyed.

So I ended up just sitting the console outside the AV cabinet, wiring it to the TV's side standard definition inputs (including audio) and turning it on to check for DOA. It came up, and I decided that was enough of that.

I turned the thing off and we watched a couple episodes of Monk.

So thanks to custom cables and questionable design decisions, sometime this weekend I need to beg, borrow, or buy a TOSLink cable, pull the receiver from the cabinet to connect said cable, fish the custom video cable out of the A/V cabinet to the TV, and build the necessary on/off macros for my Pronto.

Grumble.