I’m thinking about purchasing the new Tablo DUAL OTA DVR to replace an almost dead TivoHD, which has been used exclusively for OTA for the past three years. One concern that I have is about the sensitivity of the TV tuners in the new Tablo model. With the TivoHD and a roof top antenna, I can bring in local channels as well as some channels from more distant areas (especially in the winter, when the tress have lost their leaves).
I am wondering if any owners of the new DUAL OTA DVR model experienced any issues bringing in channels, when compared to the tuners in other devices that they own (such as a TV, etc)?
Hard to say. Several things. Obviously, lots of comments about the tuner being “not so great”. With that said, introducing an external splitter for the Tablo is often times not taken into account. So if you understand such things, then probably no problem. It is a device and since there are multiple tuners (2), there is some degradation from that, not sure the exact db loss. From my own experience, TV tuners tend to be some of the best tuners out there. And generally speaking, you can just merely “buy” that technology and put it into your own device.
So… I have the older dual and I’m satisfied, I get the same channels via the Tablo as I do for the TV. Split wise, both the TV and Tablo come off the same distribution amplifier. People say that the engineering on the newer dual is actually better (less internal splits), so I’d expect the new ones to be better. At the end of the day, it’s hard to predict your own results though. Don’t suppose there’s a Tablo user nearby? Could be the easiest way to test.
Worst case, you have to use a pre-amp and/or a distribution amp. Hard to say what you might need. I would test your Tablo in your current setup and start adding hardware, if required, as you go. This is a great reason to belong to Amazon Prime, order more hardware, wait two days, test, order more hardware, wait two days, test . . .
You might also think about moving the antenna. I moved mine about sixty feet from one end of the house to the other. It made a world of difference when I wasn’t pointing directly at my neighbor’s tree!
Many thanks for responding. My new Tablo is supposed to be delivered today, so I will get some first hand experience very soon.
My almost deal TivoHD is also a dual tuner device, so the losses caused by the internal splitter should be the same (3dB). I don;t want to add more hardware - the total cost would start to approach that of a new Tivo Roamio OTA, which defeats one of the purposes of switching to Tablo.
Experimentation is the key although I doubt the splitter analogy holds for multiple tuners. Well let’s just say it doesn’t have to hold. With good engineering that is… If tablo is buying their tuners from a Chinese commodity house then yes there will be more loss, but if they designed a multiple active tuner system you would see little or no impact .
There is a fair amount on the web and in the Tablo forums itself - if you search a little bit. I believe (but this is not an area I’m qualified to give an opinion) that the Tablo internal hardware is probably pretty good.
The tuners (multiple sources) are MaxLinear MxL603
The media transcoder (up to 6 streams) is the Vixs XCode 5190.
Demodulators for the individual tuner streams are Socionext MN88436
I hope they have changed away from the Atheros AR5B22 - that’s 802.11 a/g/g/n only. Not much to gain from using 802.11ac in conjunction with this chip. may explain some of the weaknesses in the WiFi area. Not sure why they’d have a chip that also supports Bluetooth? Note this chip doesn’t broadcast in the 5GHz range, 2.4GHz only.
While searching to find this material again, I also found some very interesting background history (recent - Nuvyyo was only founded in 2010) history. Nothing damaging or derogatory, just fleshing out my impressions of the company.