Dual Tuners, Dolby Digital

none so far...kncok on wood...From what I hear the support from Sony is not to great.

Have used without an issue for over a year. The dual tuner is a must with TIVO. Letting you watch one channel and record another at the same time. Must if you have kids. Did have one issue during the receiver setup one time where it stopped at 28% every time. Found a simple fix on the Tivo Community site. Other than that it's been great....

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none

TIVO service SUCKS! You can't talk to the same person twice. You can't get an employee number or last name. You can't get them to give the same answer twice. I'd love to have one that works. It would be great if the service was even marginal. It's a total disappointment!

Two tuners, Tivo service, great picture

Unfortunately, the unit died after only three months. Thanks to great service from DirecTV and Sony a bad hard drive was replaced and I have my unit back and working in only a couple of weeks.

I love the recorder and Tivo. The Tivo channel guide is the best I've ever seen, and I've seen a few. The ability to record two programs at once and watch a third I'd recorded earlier is amazing. I am a previous owner of the Dish Network's DishPlayer and while it was good, it lacked the two best features of the SAT T60 - Tivo and dual tuners.

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DishPlayer, Regular Tivo

Reliable, easy to set up, easy to use program guide. In my case, after the initial warranty ran out, I upgraded the disks to 230 hours. I never, ever run out of space. Upgrade is easy if you are handy with PCs and electronics. The SAT-T60's design makes it easy to do this, based on simple instructions on the Internet, or you can purchase an upgrade. The TiVo "Season Pass" ability to record recurring series -- and get only new episodes, not repeats if that's what you want -- means you never have to remember to record your favorite shows. It's great.

If you insist on channel surfing, it takes a moment to bring up the next channel.

Great product. Have used over a year with no reliability problems. As others have written, TiVo changes your life, since you no longer surf live channels and settle for mediocre material. We now watch only live sports, or recorded shows and movies we've decided we want to see.

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S-VHS recorder.

Clear picture and great sound. The TiVo integration with DSS is seamless. The remote control integrates TV and DSS/TiVo functions in one place so you can change the volume on your TV and change channels on the DSS with one remote control.

The receiver has serious reliability problems. Numerous others have reported problems with the optical digital output, remote control, and hard disk. Mine died a few days after it was installed; Sony took weeks to repair it. The unit doesn’t have the Picture-in-Picture feature that Ultimate TV has. Modem doesn’t work well and the TiVo suggestions suck, but they are improving.

Although I'm happy with the picture quality, human interface, and seamless integration of the DSS and TiVo features, I'm extremely unhappy with the reliability of the unit. It was installed for about three days when it suddenly refused to power up. A phone call to the on-line retailer, ORBITSAT.COM, was very discouraging; they didn’t even want to talk to me and referred me to Sony for warranty service… on a three-day old receiver! The people at ORBITSAT.COM wanted nothing to do with me after they got their money. Sony wasn’t much better. They did agree to repair the receiver under warranty, but they took a long to time to get it done. I was without my receiver for several weeks. I have since discovered that many people have complained about similar problems with this unit including issues with the optical digital audio, remote control, and hard disk. If you really want one of these, your best bet is to purchase at a local retailer using a credit card so you’ll have some recourse when/if your unit dies a few days after you get it home. Also, the unit is advertised as able to record 35 hours (depending on program content) but the real capacity is closer to 20 hours. The hard disk can be replaced with a bigger one using one of several after-market kits, but that immediately voids the warranty. During initial installation, the modem refused to work. A call to DirecTV solved the problem, but I had to set the modem to half-speed to make it work. The interface sometimes lags for several seconds which can be annoying when you’re trying to set up shows to record and configure the unit. The unit includes an infrared emitter which it uses to control your VCR. This allows you to pop in a blank tape and transfer a show from the DSS to tape. It’s a good idea, but the execution doesn’t work well. The emitter is mounted at the end of a flimsy, flexible plastic boom which doesn’t stay in place and looks bad sticking out in front of your VCR. All it does is tell your VCR when to start recording, but you can just as easily do this manually without the extra clutter the IR emitter causes. Finally, the TiVo component makes suggestions and automatically records shows it thinks you’ll like based on what you usually watch. The suggestions so far were terrible, but they were improving as the unit learned my tastes.

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Various DSS

DOLBY digital 5.1, 2 tuners, DSS and TIVO in one package, easy programming and recording, wish list, search features, season pass, rating limits, digital picture.

Must have receiver with optical input to utilize dolby 5.1 (no RCA jacks for 5.1), DSS often is in error reporting that a show is in 5.1, unit advertises up to 35 hours of recording but actual is 24 hours, slight hum from hard drive, $10/mo subscription to TIVO, "lifetime" subscription is only for the unit you bought; not for any other unit. If you buy another unit for a second room TIVO will soak you for another subscription fee.

I could not go back to regular TV. The fast forward feature on recorded shows let you easily skip commercials and watch a 1 hour show in 40 minutes. TIVO auto records all my shows with ease (and that's coming from someone who has never been successful getting VCR timer to record a program).

Excelent remote control. I can Finally adjust my main reciever's volume with the same remote I use to surf the channels! Access to the menu and veiwing guides is much faster, no more lag in retriving program info. Two built in tuners is a major draw to this product, I constantly record while watching another channel. And the ability to record two item at the same time is great.

The unit has crashed on me once, it promplty rebooted itself but it was a 10 minute annoyance. Tivo's suggestions are annoying, it seems to pick a genre at randon and then fill up my HD with junk. I will probably turn it off if it doesn't get better soon (although it is improving). Occational lag/freeze in switching channels. Ths is small but I was disapointed to find that in using digital audio I cannot get those Tivo "bleep" sounds :-(

Excelent product, it works as advertised. Tivo is fantastic, I wonder how I got by without it ;-) The interoperability between Tivo and Direct TV is seamless, I am now getting better performance with the new reciever than with my origional Sony DSS reciever.

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Sony DSS Direct TV reciever.

Easy recording, season pass and great picture.

Not reliable. Not only did the hard drive crash, but it didn't record a few shows because an error message would come back and then the machine would automatically delete even though I watched the show live and wanted to save for a neighbor.

Had the machine for 5 days and the hard drive crashed. Found out that 3 other employees had the same problem. Very disappointed.

Program search flexibility. Digital quality. Fast forward feature. Season Pass manager. Many more features -- all better than I'd hoped for.

Tivo's marketing really sucks. I didn't even know the thing had two tuners built-in. I bought it on the strength of one tuner, then had to run a second RG6 cable to the antenna when they upgraded the software. Meanwhile Microsoft is advertising the heck out of the fact they had TWO TUNERS! Tivo will probably wind up as more MS Chop-meat! Maybe they can bribe some political gas-bag to sue Microsoft. For customers the weakness is that Tivo is also a service which may, or may not be around for the long-haul.

When I first read about the combination of DirecTV and Tivo in the Sony T-60, I jumped on it. That was 1-1/2 years ago. Since then I am extremely satisfied with DirecTV, Sony, and Tivo. The quality of TV I'm watching is a vast improvement over the junk I used to watch. This is due to the flexibility of easily recording shows, but also from the numerous program search options. There are actually some great shows out there. The trick is being able to easily find them and record them.

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VHS Tape Crap!

Read all of the above -- bottom line: easy to use, solid hardware, great integration of TiVo and DirecTV services.

A bit slow bringing up the next channel when surfing (which I don't need to do much anymore -- we mostly watch what we asked TiVo to record for us). Would like a screen that shows how many hours have been recorded, with an estimate of remaining hours (though not a factor anymore for me with 230 hours of capacity). Finally, I wish it could show both tuner channels in a picture-in-picture format -- not a big deal, but would be nice to have.

Great integration of TiVo and DirecTV services. Excellent, easy to use user interface. Until you use TiVo or similar service, you don't actually believe all the praise it receives, but what happens is, it forever changes how you watch TV. No longer do you surf though the live TV wasteland, wasting time on questionable shows. Instead, when you feel like TV, you sit down and check out what TiVo has recorded. In other words, you watch only what you want to watch. Oh, and with the super fast foward, we now only watch the commercials that we want to watch (yes, there are a few great ones out there). The T60 is well-made. Ours came with 35 hour recording capacity; I've since upgraded the hard drives to 230 hours using the guidance of the AVS Forum and the Hinsdale posts. With two built-in receivers, we can be recording two DirecTV programs while watching a 3rd pre-recorded program. Season Pass - we no longer miss new episodes of our favorite network shows, and it won't record repeats per our instructions. Season Pass alone is worth the price of the ticket. And if we do watch a live program, for example a ball game, we can easily pause the live action to take a phone call, etc. Finally, the DirecTiVo saves the MPEG2 signal that DirecTV broadcasts, with no format conversion. The played-back signal is equal to what was put up on the satellite. Until I can purchase a HDTV DirecTiVo (not available), this is as good as it gets.

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Original RCA DirecTV receiver; JVC S-VHS VCR.