I've been playing with an amplifier for my cable signal, and can't get much improvement out of it. The problem is, I think, that I really need to hook it up in the basement in place of a 4-way splitter down there, rather than at my end where it's just amplifying line noise along with the signal.

But worse, it turns out the DVD/VCR combo I bought in December last year (a Zenith XBV442) is kinda crap. I suspected as much from an occasional popping noise on DVD playback, but what happened with my fiancée's identical machine is even weirder. Her DVD player had no problems until we moved it one night to bring to her parents' house, and since it was put back in it has increasingly (except the last time we used it) had popping noises worse than anything heard on my machine. (One site speculates that the models produced in August '04 all suck, but the September '04 models may work.) On her VCR, tapes experience glitches mroe frequently than on other VCRs, and in some cases have worked one time but not another due to inconsistent tracking. I've seen some of this now in my machine, where once it encountered a little hiccup in the tape it couldn't compensate and then showed a crappy picture from that point forward. And this is the crux of my problem.

I bought the DVD/VCR combo for myself for two reasons: 1) I didn't have a regular DVD player in my bedroom, and 2) my VCR was getting old and never really recorded things very well sound-wise. This particular combo is unique in one respect: It has a regular coax output which is shared by the DVD and VCR components, so it will work with older TVs. No other combo I could find, nor indeed any DVD player, had a regular coax output--only digital coax for audio.

Now I'm kinda stumped. Replacing my DVD/VCR combo, which works reasonably well enough for most things, seems extreme. However my goal is to record some stuff from VHS tapes to DVD, which won't be possible until I can resolve this blasted tracking issue.

The tracking problem seems to occur with older tapes, not top-quality ones that have miraculously survived the test of time. The tape I'm currently trying to save is not perfect, but plays well in most players. Right now it looks like my best option may be to try to record 15-minute segments, and in the event of a glitch to simply back up and try again. This is painstaking and stupid, but may be the only reasonable way for me to transfer the tape.