Which is better the 1600 or the 1150

[divinehammer]

Recently my cable company has gone all digital. So it is time I think to upgrade from GBPVR to NextPVR with that I need to have a new card currently I am running a Haup PVR 150. Running on standard XP SP3.
I am trying to figure out which card to buy it seems that not many people like the 1600 but it seems to have additional tuners and hardware encoding. I doubt I will use the analog tuner because I dont have an antenna but the hardware encoding seems good considering my aging system. Which card do you think that I should go with? It has to be PCI so if there is a better suggestion out there on the cards let me know. Thanks for your replies.

[naador]

In my experience the 1600 is terrible for QAM. I had 2 of them and neither one would reliably find QAM channels. I replaced them with a single HVR-2250 (which is PCI-E so wouldn't work for you) and have never had a problem since. Also if you won't be using analog the hardware encoding on the 1600 is a moot point as digital is encoded by the broadcaster.

[pcostanza]

Yep, my 1600 hasn't been something to brag about with QAM but I do love Hauppauge products. MY 2250 has done extremely well for me as does my 950q. But, I have no experience with the 1150 so I can't give you any opinion about it.

[divinehammer]

Thanks for the replies here sounds like the 1600 is crap.

[sub]

I think the problem stems from the original revision HVR-1600s not supporting QAM. The next revision also didnt officially support QAM, but had a tuner capable of it, even though it wasn't very good at it. A subsequent revision introduced a new tuner or demod that offically enabled QAM and did it quite well.

From memory this was the first Hauppauge device to include QAM support, but confuses matters by only introducing QAM support it half way through when moved to slightly different components.

[ElihuRozen]

I can confirm what sub said in terms of a later 1600 being fine. I have one & have never had any issues with it using QAM.

[ga_mueller]

fwiw, I have had great QAM performance on my 950q's. Like you, I only have a PCI slot, which is used for my video card.

[nitrogen_widget]

Don't mean to bump, but I have a 1600 and not worried about QAM.

however my card has worse reception than my TV.
My plan is to put the antenna in the crawl space & feed the cable to my server on the 2nd floor & stream to my media PC hooked up to the TV so I don't have to run an antenna wire to the TV.

Is there a hauppauge tuner with better reception being made now I can use or should I keep what I have & try a signal booster?