Jaipur — Okay so there’s this old Sansui CRT TV at home. Black, dusty, heavier than it has any right to be. The power cord ended in two bare wires, red and black, just hanging out. Not a great first impression.
I gave it power anyway. A tiny red LED came on at the bottom. The screen did nothing.
At this point I had honestly started writing its obituary in my head. Cause of death: being old, probably.
Then I pressed the channel button.
Thunk. The screen crackled, the tube did that high pitched whine, and the whole thing went blue. That old no-signal blue.
It wasn’t dead. It was on standby. It had just been waiting for someone to press a button for like… years.
Talking to it
The TV only understands composite, yellow for video and white for audio. My laptop only speaks HDMI. So I picked up a tiny HDMI to AV converter box (Kensonic KX231) from the market. I went to the old city of Jaipur, home to the markets of long lost electronics, and caused a pretty bad traffic jam with my car in Nehru Bazaar. Anyways, the box says “Full HD 1080p” on it, which is a lie, but a lovable one. It takes 1080p in and squishes it down to whatever a CRT eats.
MacBook → USB-C hub → HDMI → converter → RCA → Sansui. Switch it to PAL, put the TV on AV and…
It works!
I’ve been blasting AC/DC live on it for hours now.
The picture is soft, the colours bleed a little, and there’s this rainbow shimmer on the stage floor that no modern screen would ever let happen. It looks great tho. Better than it should, honestly. And the speakers are genuinely good, two little grilles on the sides of the tube going absolutely ham on the guitar riffs.
Not bad for something that was one button press away from the obituaries section.
Now it needs a proper job. A JARVIS terminal maybe. A retro gaming setup maybe. Both maybe.
More when there’s more…