Apr
14
Older Displays with DVI Inputs
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HDMI may be all the rage but it wasn’t too long ago that the premier digital video connection was DVI (Digital Visual Interface for short) and many sets in service still use the connection. The biggest difference between HDMI and DVI involve bandwidth and the ability to transmit audio on the same cable, with HDMI winning out on both fronts.
DVI cables and interfaces come in many different types; some (older versions) are analog video only, while others have the ability to carry analog or digital video. In a nutshell if your display only accepts digital visual interface (DVI) you still have the ability to receive digital audio and video.
You’ll want to use DVI cable (of course) and pair it with a digital optical or coaxial cable to carry the video. While you might not get the exact same pristine digital audio and video as you would a newer HDMI revision, you’re probably not that far off either. More information can be found here on digital visual interface in all its varied forms.
Apr
4
In my 17 years of involvement with custom audio/video I’ve had a lot of conversations on the subject, a lot of the same conversations as a matter of fact but one subject has never come up, not even once. In all the years of talking with client after client I’ve never heard anyone say, “we pulled too much wire” or “I really wish we’d had you guys run fewer cables”.
I suppose this falls right in-line with (although not nearly as famously as) you can never be too rich or too thin, back to the point. If you’re pre-wiring a new home, remodeling an existing home or just running some cable to your current home theater, run extra cables. Why run extra cables you ask? Because in just about every case I’ve witnessed there’s no such thing as an extra cable. i.e. you’ll eventually find a use for it.
I’ve mentioned this before but networked home theater devices are becoming more and more common, who had the foresight to run Ethernet to their equipment rack 10-15 years ago? It’s almost a given that no matter how many cables you run, eventually, sometime down the road you’re going to find use for another CAT-5, component, HDMI or Ethernet cable. Simply put it cost less to run them now versus later. Or just think of it the way our installation team does, always run a spare.
Mar
17
I can tell you one of the fastest ways to waste a lot of time (yeah I know no one would actually want to do that, but just in case) and that’s to not label and or organize the cables in your home theater system. Sooner or later for trouble shooting or re-arranging purposes you’re going to need to identify that left-rear surround or front-right speaker lead from the rest of the cables in your system. You know, the cables behid your system that resemble some abstract painting of a bowl of spaghetti.
Whether it’s with a sharpie on masking tape or nice n’ neat labels printed from a Brother label maker or freaking hieroglyphics* get something on those cables to identify them. Go all the way through the speakers, LF= left front, RF= right front, SUB= subwoofer etc. etc. Also try and get all of your audio and video source cables labeled as well, this makes fast work of system maintenance and hardware additions.
Another habit I try to keep is sorting cables by type when installing the system or doing any maintenance after the fact. If you haven’t peeked behind your system in months (or years in many cases) the gaggle of cables may look like an incomprehensible rats-nest, grouped by type however they can be sorted in half the time. *note: should you opt for hieroglyphics, the symbol for center channel speaker is one legged crane, moon in sky, jumping fish, one legged crane.
Mar
8
RS-232 and You
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Everyone likes the assurance that they’ve bought the best, right, appropriate, etc., product and from time to even those in the know run across something unfamiliar or unknown. RS-232 connections and or connectors may fall into that very category. By now we’re all pretty much familiar with analog audio and video connections, component video, HDMI, and digital audio connections but what about RS-232 serial connections?
The first thing you should know about RS-232 is that well, unless you have an advanced control system, ala Crestron, AMX, Control-4 or alike you probably don’t need to worry about the protocol at all. RS-232 connections are for control systems (above) that can take advantage of direct serial control and or two-way serial control, this type of serial control is far from the norm for consumer electronics.
Direct serial control differs from infra-red (IR) in that a hardwired connection (in the form of a RS-232 cable or similar) is used to connect the control system and other devices together directly. In essence the “controller” can give the connected devices commands directly, eschewing less accurate control protocols like radio-frequency and infra-red altogether.
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Feb
27
While HDMI is rapidly becoming the de-facto cable of choice in many applications, component cables (for video) paired with digital audio cables are still widely used and will be for some time, you’ll notice I said digital audio cables and not cable singular. For years now we’ve had two different connection methods for passing the same digital audio stream, namely optical and coaxial. While both are perfectly capable of transmitting digital audio from one device to another I do have a preference between the two.
A typical coaxial digital-audio cable won’t look all the different from a standard “RCA” cable and as a matter of fact given the cables resistance of 75ohms, a composite video cable will work just fine in this application. Keep in mind that one-half of a stereo cable and or single channel RCA audio cable shouldn’t be substituted for a 75ohm digital cable; as these cables are intended for 50ohm applications i.e. analog audio. While it’s easy to mistake a coaxial digital cable for something else, Toslink digital-audio cables shouldn’t prove hard to identify, the end of the connector will have a square, plastic housing and clear center conductor or tip.
Which do I prefer? coaxial, its essentially maintenance free, more robust and for all practical purposes identical in sound quality to Toslink cables. As a matter of fact since we’re talking about digital signals the only thing would give one of these transmission methods an advantage over the other; would be the quality of the transmitter/receivers in the individual pieces of gear. Toslink is fine and will give excellent results in most cases but in my experience coaxial cables tend to cause less transmission errors and last longer to boot.
Feb
20
Network Your Home Theater
Filed Under Equipment Cables | Leave a Comment
It may sound a bit strange but when potential clients ask me for home theater “tips” I always try to mention a network interface for their home theater equipment. In days past we thought about cables in terms of things like composite, s-video, component and eventually HDMI but ethernet cabling is rapidly becoming as important as any other cable in our home theater systems.
Whether for devices like AppleTV, Blu-ray players, game consoles, home theater PC’s, infra-red repeater systems, networked audio/video balun’s or any number of as yet unforeseen home theater devices, you can bet that eventually you’ll find that “killer app” for net connectivity in the living room.
If you’re pulling cable now (or having it done) take my advice; go ahead and add an extra CAT-5/6 cable for ethernet to that list. What about Wi-Fi you ask? sure wireless is an option and in many cases it’ll work just fine, again though I say if you’re already pulling wire, hardwired ethernet’s the way to go.
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