I'd recommend picking up a FTA sat receiver and see what all you can grab. They have uncompressed HD signals out there that look pretty cool. Not to mention all the random channels and whatnot that somehow still broadcast.

Are you saying a church doesn't sell anything? The guy is driving a car and is employed by the church. They had to get that money from somewhere.

I've a professional AV person in your state and we're out there to help. In the case of a hotel or hospital they have a cable head-end where they have rack full of receivers. From there they break out to a custom CATV distribution system. Then they can use the analog tuner in their displays.

56dB C weighting. I'd have guessed louder. My desktop is in an old rackmount case and the fans are really loud.

I'd dare say 2001 is probably what makes him say that.

You seem to have an overly strong bias for the purity of Japanese production over American. Last I checked Studio Ghibli completely destroys any source material they can get their hands on. In fact any Anime adaptation of a western IP has always been hugely divergent from the source. I'll just throw Howl's Moving Castle and Earthsea out there.

As an AV guy that works with higher-ed and government on occasion I wholly support this comment.

I work for a professional installer and I have no idea what TVs you're talking about. Are you thinking of (large-ish) computer monitors? I can't think of a single pro TV that doesn't have IR.