Audio/video cables: advice needed

Post by **Lennart** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 10:58 am

Hi all,

We are currently remodelling our living room. That means that the walls are openened up and I have the opportunity to put some wires in. One of the things that needs some serious wiring is our television/home cinema setup. The television is a flat screen lcd that will be located about 5 to 7 meters (in cable length) from the rest of the equipment.

Cables that are needed are, among others, scart, component and hdmi.

When I look at all the cables that are on offering, I find that prices vary from "too cheap to be any good" to "really outrageous", and anything in between.

My questions:

- As hdmi is a digital signal, does the quality of the cable matter at all (beyond some basic threshold, off course)?
- For scart I could see that a better cable makes sense. However, what would be the right trade-off between price and quality?
- Is > 5 meters of scart acceptable?

In short: do I really have to spend many hundreds of euros on cables for my setup? And what would be a good brand (and shop maybe)?

I've been looking at Lindy cables (http://www.lindy.com), as these seem to be at least more reasonably priced than Monster cables and the like. But are they any good?

Maybe it's a little off-topic, but I could really use some advice (this is a one time shot and I'd hate to have to open up the walls again) and I'm sure many of you have a neat home cinema setup, beside the home automation addiction.

Thanks!

Lennart

Post by **Snelvuur** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 3:22 pm

i for 1, want to make a space from 1 end to the other end of the living room. (half way) to keep it simple, if you want to change the tv from one side of the room to the other one (you know, wifes remodulling the room) then you can at least put your cables in something.

About the cables, i've had the monster cables with the gold stuff and the normal cheap cables. If your picture is not HD, then i dont see any difference. Since i have not played a lot with HD and hdmi, i cant tell yet. But the hdmi cables i have are pretty long, and still give me sharp video (got it at mediamarkt for a few bucks)

// Erik (binkey.nl)

p.s. your also stalling time to go to the "parents"? [}:)]

Post by **akhe** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 6:41 pm

As always you pay for what you get. True up to a level then most people would not notice any difference.

The best thing to do when it is possible to do it is to put in as many empty tubes as possible in the walls. The cost is pretty low at this stage. At least one tube to each room from some central spot.

Cheers
/Ake

Post by **Digit** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 9:57 pm

Can't really help you on the cable quality things, but Ake is right; you can never have too much empty tubes. Our house was built in 1996; ow, if i just would have known then what i know now...[V]

Post by **MindBender** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 2:46 pm

I've had the same doubts for HDMI/DVI cables. I have worked at the Philips TV lab for 3 years and nobody seemed to be able to answer that question. For all we know the analog properties (eg. cross-talk) of these cables don't matter very much. But because we had budget and nobody wanted to take any risc we always bought expensive cables. Though I really don't see any reason for buying these expensive cables. For some reason (analog legacy?) they are on the market and that seems a good reason for many of us to buy them.
Most modern displays have HDMI inputs with re-equalizers in their front-end. These are making sure that all signals are leveled and phased correctly, making them far less picky about length and impedance, giving even less reason to buy the expensive onces.
My rule of thumb here is to avoid the really cheap onces to prevent mechanical failure. I have seen cables that appear to be really thick, getting 75% of their thickness from plastic insulation...
I have just purchased a 5M HDMI cable, a 10M HDMI cable and a 4-way HDMI splitter box, costing about 12, 30 and 95 Euro and all works well. I usually try to avoid to use chrome on gold contacts because the gold may be polluted by the chrome, but it really doesn't matter very much.

For S-VHS (S-Video) it's a whole different story. My 20 meter cable gives a fuzzy image, even though it's a very thick one. But that is to be expected on those lenghts and it doesn't matter very much for a small bedroom tv. I'm using a professional distribution amplifier for that, but I didn't even bother to use it's balanced audio output.