 Hey, so congratulations. You decided to buy a Sony PVM 2030. This is one of the most iconic PVMs simply because of the black cube design. It also has a unique set of features that aren't on every other PVM and is truly an unsung hero and one of the more underrated PVMs that were ever made. However, you might be asking yourself, how do I properly set this up? Consider it. It's a 30 year old monitor and there's not much documentation online about how to properly use this in 2021. Now, in order to get this properly set up, we don't want to start with the front of the monitor. We need to go around and look at the back. So let's switch around now and take a look at the back side. On the back of the monitor, you've got two important sections. First, the top section, which is more about adjustments and settings a little bit. The only thing I will tell you first off is to make sure that the controls up here, let's say remote and manual at the top are both in the on position. I'll zoom in a little bit so you can see that exactly right next to the Sony label. Make sure they are both snapped in the on position and that means you can control the TV with a remote and the manual buttons on the front side. For now, let's not concern ourselves with the rest of these. We'll get into that a little bit later. First off, let's focus on this area down here and talk about the different inputs. First we have our computer input on the far left. This is a D sub connector. I believe it's 25 pins. There is a switch on here that says sync on green. Most of the time, you're going to be using sync on green off. So you'll have normal sync going into this monitor not sync on green. This is what we'll be using for our RGB input. It accepts RGB and it accepts digital RGB. So you may even have a retro computer that outputs digital RGB that you could hook up to this D sub with a separate adapter. But what we're going to do is use a SCART adapter into this and that will give us our RGB input. Under that, you've got control S in and out which are just controls that are pretty much obsolete at this point that Sony had control S where you could daisy chain different devices such as VHS players and other controllers that were made by Sony and link them together for use with a single remote. Next, we've got our two composite inputs line A and line B. Again, we've got a switch where it says off and on and then 75 ohms. That is your terminator. So it has built-in termination. So you do not need to add 75 ohm terminators on here. What you do need to do is leave it on if you're not daisy chaining the outputs to another device. Or if you are daisy chaining, then make sure that you turn the switch to off and then daisy chain into your secondary device from the output. Now you could see these are not normal connections. If you just getting into broadcast quality video, you will not be probably familiar with these. These are B and C style connectors and you can use a B and C style cable or what we will do is we will convert this to an RCA input. That way we can feed in a normal composite cable, a normal analog video cable into these and those adapters will be slid on and just snapped on and we'll show you that when we connect everything. Under that you've got left and right audio. You can input your audio into this monitor and then output to another device again. There's our line A. Line B is designed the exact same way as line A. And then we've got a VTR in and this is another input that is switchable. Most of the time you're going to be using it switch to the left so you can access the S video input on the back of this monitor. It also has stereo audio inputs and then it has this green connector which is an obsolete VTR connector for a videotape recorder that was a commercial style video recorder used back in the 80s. Under the VTR you'll notice these red and black inputs that is for your stereo audio out. This monitor has a built-in amplifier so you can get stereo audio directly out of the monitor which is not a normal feature of really any other PVM other than these 30 series and maybe the 2950. Speakers you need to use 8 to 16 ohm speakers that's really your only qualification or specification that you need to worry about for the speakers. And then you've got a right positive and negative input and a left positive and negative input. Those are very simple to install and it is a very nice feature of this monitor to have that. Finally we have an additional AC output that works. So this is a hot output whenever your monitor is plugged in you can add another plug into this that operates on 120 volts and that will give you a live electricity right out of that even if the monitor is turned off. This monitor does include a built-in power cable so please note that and then there are racks on the side to store the power cable when you want to turn it or move it you can wrap the cord around there and safely secure it. Now the only two inputs on this monitor that have outputs are line A for composite and line B for composite. You cannot daisy chain out either the computer input or the S video so you cannot go out of this monitor and daisy chain into another if with just using the RGB or the S video. All right that's a good explanation let's start hooking some things up. First off this is the D sub adapter that is sold by different suppliers online. It's converting the D sub into RGB sync and it is not c-sync just but it will accept c-sync and this simply plugs in and it gives you your video feed into your computer output so when we use the computer input I'm sorry the computer input when we use that on our monitor we have now got a SCART plug to plug either our console or our SCART switcher in you'll notice we have a left and a right audio in or you know into the monitor and we can use this with this monitor even though there's not a physical audio signal built in to the computer input we can use one of the any of these other audios for one that we're not using or one that we might daisy chain so let me show you for example I'm going to plug in to the A line my left and my right audio and this would be an example of how to set up properly to use RGB and get your audio signal show you that when we turn it on we'll leave it set like that and that would mean that you're probably not going to use line A but I can show you a way to use line A for both composite and to do your audio that would be simply adding say a Y connector and you need to add one of these to each left and right and that way you connect the right from your computer adapter in then you could connect your other side right audio from your composite input so that would not be this side but that would be the input cable from your composite device that you're feeding into it and then you just attach I just attach the B and C to RCA adapter so that it can have normal cables slide on and off of it so you could put your composite video in here and then your right audio from your composite device could go in there and then you'd have another Y connector like this on here and you do the same thing for the left side audio so you have left and right audio breaking out for both that way you could use this but a lot if you don't have any other reason to input into that and you just want to use it for only the computer input and you're not going to use the video input then you can set it up like that and you'll be fine now again if you want to use the RCA or the B and C adapter you can use the RCA adapter and then you'll have the video you can plug in here and then left and right audio and then S video is just connected into there and you could do the same thing on the outputs have it going out to something on each one of these and you can again either use a B and C cable or one of these RCA adapters the last thing you want to connect are your left and your right speakers and that would just be connected by pushing down these slipping in the cable copper end and then letting them go and they'll hold them in place and obviously you can plug anything that you need to into this so now we're going to go ahead and turn this around and we'll run a demo on how to get your audio working through this adapter setup now we could get the monitor turned on and start looking at some of our controls we could press power and it will take a second for the monitor to come on and we have a control over here if you press the control button it will light up your control buttons that you could use to make adjustments or change inputs on the side here on the right hand side you have a volume control and a picture control the picture control is pretty much another contrast control there's not an actual contrast control listed on here so picture works as contrast under that you've got four lit up selections and these are your input selections you've got line A line B VTR and computer at the bottom the ones that you're currently on will be blinking so we have line A and computer blinking so to switch to whatever inputs you'd simply select that input press the button it'll switch over to that input right now we're on line A which would be composite analog video line B is composite analog video VTR is S video or the VTR input and then computer is our computer input you notice every time you press computer you'll get one of these flashing with it it's whichever one you press before computer so if I press B and then computer it would be B and computer flashing VTR and computer VTR and computer flashing and that is how you connect the audio so we have our audio connected to line A so we want line A flashing and we want computer flashing so whatever inputs you have your audio connected to that needs to be flashing with your computer input over here are just some picture controls and some other sound controls from this point below these last three are all to do with sound you've got left and right balance base and treble controls for your amplifier above that we have subscript controls you have hue color brightness and sharpness just so you know if you are using the computer input you will not get to use hue color or sharpness that is only for S video or composite video those three selections so pressing them will literally do nothing when you are using the computer input what you can do is adjust your brightness and your picture or contrast on any input that you're using there's also a reset button at the top that will reset it if you get your color or hear hue or your brightness or your picture if you change that a lot and you want to get back to what the normal setting is when you turn the monitor on you simply hit reset and it will do that now let's turn our super nintendo on and we should get a picture on our screen here there we go now please note that when you initially power this monitor on and any monitor that's from the 1990s and that older age there is generally a warm-up period this one will take about 15 seconds for it to warm up and finally show an image on initial startup then you can leave it running and it'll look beautiful but these older monitors do take a little bit of time to warm up and then generally you want to give them at least five minutes to really warm up before you just really make any adjustments that way the CRT is warmed up everything's good on it and that is completely normal even a service CRT can take that time to warm up we've got our picture on here this is RGB and again we are using audio through line a all that is working and that is a majority of how we would control this monitor we would not get any other controls in this monitor there is no submenu built into it that is one of the down features on this monitor but it does again have many other good features that we've already discussed one other feature that it has that we have not talked about is it's limited support for a remote control I don't have the official remote anymore for this television there is or this monitor there is an official one that came with the monitor to begin with but what I have is a Sony television remote from a similar television this remote is why 137a now I can't use 95 percent of the buttons on this but what I can do is if I have it set to TV I could do a couple things first off I have a muting button and if I press it it hits mute so I can control mute with this but remote I can also power it off and put it into standby mode which turns the tube off but you'll notice it's still powered on and you just hit power and it'll come back on and we'll take a second to turn on like that so once it's on I can control the if you press up and down on volume I can control up and down on the volume control and again turn it on and off now if you have the official remote it will let you cycle through inputs and it will give you the picture control on the remote control but that's it there's nothing else on there that's pretty much all there is to the remote that's official unfortunately my remote will not let me change inputs or do the picture control but you could probably get a Sony code for any universe remote and get at least the functionality to control the volume and turn the monitor on and off without getting up and pushing the power button you can leave it in standby mode and it'll be perfectly fine and safe let's look at the back panel on top again one more time and go over the important things on here we've already talked about the control features make sure they again are set to on and then just a quick look at your model number label over here it should say 2030 give you some other information the important thing on here is that the ac current on this monitor is rated for 120 volts 50 slash 60 hertz so it should support PAL consoles as well as NTSC and 150 watt max so that's all you need to know about power next to it we have these one two three four five controls and only two of them are important so let's talk about those two first that would be this v-hold knob which spins and then our degauss button which is a push button and then you just let it go the rest of these are pretty much useless start with degauss degaussing is a process to try to use a magnetic burst to push all your electrons back to where they're supposed to be so if you have a purity or a discoloration on the screen please use this degausser that is built into the monitor you simply have your monitor turned on let it warm up for 30 seconds and then you just push in this button now sony says to properly do it you need to hold the button down for about 20 seconds and then let it go and then don't do that again for another say 15 minutes but that is going to clear up 99% of any color issues that you have on your monitor if you if you have it that does happen when you move a monitor or maybe introduce a speaker to it temporarily you might get a discoloration just come in here and use this degausser to correct the color again we have this notch and new dynamic color these i've never been able to get these to actually do anything they do have some claims in the manual to do something but they don't really do anything when you try to use them the best thing you can do is just leave them to their normal settings which just like over here is going to be the highlighted or blocked out selection so new dynamic color you can just leave it to the on setting notch leave it to the off setting over here again horizontal center i wish this did work for regular analog video but it only works for digital rgb but the v-hold will work on any signal and what that is is if you turn on your monitor and you have an issue with vertical scrolling like the picture will look uh go up and down a fast sometimes it could just be a little bit of a scroll when you switch an input you might notice a slow scroll to the next input down or it might scroll up spin this until your image is stable and then that will fix all those issues so if you get one of these monitors and scroll in real bad that's very common because a lot of times these will get spun or turned easily and it'll just throw this the setting off and it's an easy fix just turn your v-hold and that'll be it well there you go now you should be able to turn on your monitor navigate through the inputs a little bit and use it for gaming it's also really great for old analog video that is in the form of a vhs or even old four by three dvds and laser discs any of that older video format will really look superb on this monitor you can definitely use those analog inputs for other things again like a vcr or a laser display or most of those are only composites so that's a great thing to plug into that line a and line b and in the s video you can plug in anything that it really has s video support and it will of course look great as good right below the rgb which will look the best on this crt the tube itself is under right under 600 tv lines for resolution again it is a true 20 inch size so it's one inch bigger than 95 percent of the sony pvms that are out there most of them are only 19 inches this one does need to be adjusted internally for geometry and other colors and things like that with the tube so it's not something that you're just going to be able to make a lot of adjustments while you're using it it's going to have one overall adjustment setting for the screen and then you just kind of work with that there are some devices that you could get to help you change the geometry a little bit that are electronic that are outside of the monitor i'd suggest maybe adding something like that but all in all it's a great monitor it's a perfect for most people because it's pretty simple to use and there's not really anything you could screw up with it it's a real good workhorse especially one that's been restored like the one you see here and that's pretty much it go ahead that would use it enjoy it and i will see you guys next time with some more retro content