Janey, Did the Hallmark channel show much on the horse participants? RFD was heavy on the many horse features. Probably because one the hosts is very much into that subject. Has a weekly show on RFD featuring horses. She skimmed through the floats rather quickly in many cases, but dwelled more on the horse groups. All in all I liked RFD's coverage. I watched the London Parade...seemed to be more of a mass confusion than a parade. Was surprised at how many bands from the USA was there.

Well the best is a discrete Dolby Atmos 7.2.4 surround sound system for example. DTS has an equivalent setup. Bars just don't cut it if discrete mutl-channel audio is also an option. Optical will provide you with Dolby Digital 2.0 to 5.1 which has been the audio standard dating back to DVDs. Better quality and more channel audio can be had over HDMI cables but TVs are not going to have the best decoders in them to take advantage-- a separate AVR or even a separate AV processor will.

You're munging unrelated and different things together. What will dictate what connectors you use is what kind of connectors your hardware has sockets for. Both HDMI and Toslink (optical) are for digital transport. There's no quality of a digital signal, it either arrives or it doesn't (binary situation). An electron doesn't know what kind of wire it's passing through. Buy the cheapest HDMI cable you can find, both Amazon and cables.com offer good choices. And yes, so-called HDMI-Arc is for using a common remote, which may or may not be an important objective for you. I don't worry or bother with it myself. Don't be shy about using analog connections (the kind with so-called RCA plugs) if part of the connection system needs it. They work fine. How many speakers you have determine the sound experience you have. A "surround" system with multiple speakers in front and behind will produce a surround experience. Not all movie sources people watch at home provide a true surround signal. When a stereo signal is put through a surround receiver, it produces a surround experience of sorts by processing the audio in a limited way. Much of the audio for in-home movies isn't that terrific anyway so it's easy to overkill the hardware for what ultimately may be mediocre sound sources. It's true that a poor system won't produce a faithful delivery of an excellent source but an excellent system fed a poor signal can only do so much with what it has. Some people have undiscerning ears and, to exaggerate, find no difference between a car radio and a stereo system. Or between a cheap stereo system and an excellent one. Even those who care may like so many others lose hearing acuity as they age. So don't sweat what you're doing, you may very well not hear the difference between something mid-range or better and something cheap.

happens to me all the time.. went to hit the W.. or an s... and clicked CAPS LOCK ... whatever ... the sin is not being able to type and look at what i am typing at the same time ... lol pix plz ... and add some pertinent history ... pot grown.. transplanted.. indoor or outdoor.. seed grown.. etc ... ken