Connectivity Guide

All kinds of home entertainment devices are starting to take advantage of HD's superior resolution and image quality. But hooking up your HDTV up to these machines is not always as simple as it ought to be. Some audiovisual components can't handle the HD signal at all, and others need to be connected in specific ways. This section is designed to help you figure it all out, and rig your home system like a pro.

Connection Types

A simplified guide to audiovisual connections, new and old, analog and digital.

Connecting to Input Sources

Hook up your HDTV to a set-top tuner box, a DVD player, or a gaming console.

Connecting to Recording Devices

Which ones work in HD, which ones don't, and the necessary connections.

Adios to analog

HD is changing everything about home entertainment, including the way we connect devices to one other. Why all the fuss? Two reasons. First, the technical superiority of an all-digital connection. By avoiding digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions, signal integrity remains pure throughout. Second, there's a growing demand in the entertainment industry for "smart" connections that support digital rights management (DRM), the new generation of copy protection technologies. DRM relies not on cumbersome security programs appended to the disc itself, but to secure authentication at the connection level, between devices. It's not only more reliable, it's less intrusive to the user - and presents less of a target for hackers. HDMI (High Definition Multipurpose Interface) is the leading implementation of this approach, a two-way digital connection that carries both audio and video, with built-in support for Intel's powerful HDCP security protocol.