No, but sometimes you can taste them.

Please do not try to taste the electrons.

That (RCA component) was fucking stupid.

Why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing between sources requires external sync, which is only on pro gear and an extra cable anyway)
Why did they not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?

Should have just adopted SCART (European connector for bidirectional A/V, RGBA and kind of CEC), dammit

Oh I know. Single income family on a farm makes money for that sort of stuff a little tight.

That explains the slight interference I was getting. There must have been a signal just in range to scramble things but not close enough to see or hear. Our stations were on 12, 6 and 10 and you could get PBS on 32 on UHF.

Yes, SCART’s features are fucking clever but it got unwieldy thick because by the spec, each cable had to be separately shielded. Even the widescreen control signal that’s mostly DC. Why not use differential pairs to reduce thickness and cost, modulate the audio and control signals together for fewer wires, and add a 5V rail to accomodate little demodulating converters (if you want separate audio devices) and eventually power PVR/tuner dongles? Most people use TV speakers anyway, that’s the whole point of a single connector of an A/V standard. Not to mention how easily it fell out, almost every other connector holds better, and the ports are hard to feel on the back of the TV. If it’s a giant 32" one nearly flush against a wall, good luck lining it up whenever you yank a controller cord and the vibration makes it fall off! And while a small STB can hang off RCA jacks, SCART sometimes disconnects by the weight of the cable itself. Or it gets angled so the video passthrough stops working and you only find later your VCR recorded just audio.

I think it’s because of these problems, the biggest one emerged: SCART never became a worldwide standard. Nowadays, TVs are made for a world market, so even North America finally enjoys PAL-compatible sets (while most Europe-market ones and many VCRs were 3-standard since 1990), but unfortunately SCART is basically gone, not to mention very few capture cards were made with real RGB input because RCA component is stupid (why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing requires external sync, which is only on pro equipment and an extra cable anyway) why not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?)

clever Frenchies

Don’t say that. SCART is awesome despite its flaws but the same people also cursed half of Europe with fucking SECAM. Imagine needing a 64µs, 5MHz-bandwidth delay line just to decode color at all (unlike NTSC/PAL’s QAM, SECAM’s FM allows just a single chroma channel per line, alternatingly carrying U and V axes), and a frequency-modulation+pre-emphasis system in every console/camera/DVD player to encode it, plus no color killer option (disabling the colorburst) for sharp B/W like on the Apple II!

In PAL, information between subsequent lines was used too but only to correct recovered carrier phase between colorbursts, which was optional (cheaper sets kept NTSC-style hue controls) and could be handled by a locked oscillator rather than a whole-ass delay line (before shift registers (digital sequential-access-memory), every color set had fucking piezo transducers and physical waves travelling through precisely cut quartz, WTF?!).

I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn’t notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.

It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be “TV” on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have “TV” plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren’t built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.

Anymore.

Canada was either channel 3 or 4 depending on the device. Probably all American made then.

Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.