The DirecTV installer found his way to Ranchero Indebto this week, just in time for us to watch the US Soccer team fall painfully out of the World Cup … in glorious high definition (HDTV). Yeah, I balked at doing the dish installation myself. It only took minutes to dial in the HDTV signal once the new dish was bolted up … and lemmetellya, it’s sweet. Watching standard def on a big HDTV was just plain wrong …

When you stretch a 480 pixel signal to fit a wide screen, it can’t help but look bad. You get that HDTV home, plug in the wires from a standard (non-HDTV) box, and set yourself up for disappointment. Once you hook into a wicked 1080 feed, you see everything you’ve been missing.

Soccer players don’t look like chunky JPEG-artifacted blobs anymore!

I followed a tip from helpful Gnomie and ordered a set of three HDMI cables along with a 2-to-1 HDMI switchbox … all for roughly the price of one HDMI cable at Best Buy. I’ll post the full details — along with a bunch of photos of the crazy wiring — after all the goodies arrive this week …