[Zoom]

I need a long component video cable to run through my walls between a ceiling-mounted projector and my home theater amp. It needs to be about 15 ft long. I want good quality, but not ridiculous quality. I've seen lots of stuff on the web, but it's very hard to tell what's real and what's hype. I just have no frame of reference on what's good and what it should cost.

I need two recommendations:

(1) A good brand or type of cable
(2) A good place to buy it at a fair price

Thanks!

[MaxPower2k3]

the following websites have top-notch service, prices, and selection on cables. i've used both of them with great success:

http://www.pacificcable.com

http://www.cablesamerica.com

As for brand, I can't really help you, but anything there should be fine.

[Zoom]

Thanks for the info!

As I'm thinking more about it, though, I realize that what I really need, on both ends, is a patch panel or face plate adapter. I imagine what I'll find is a faceplate with female RCA jacks on both sides (inside and out), but is there a better solution for this?

[MaxPower2k3]

Those are called Keystone jacks/faceplates, and are probably mostly what you'll find. If you trust your wiring abilities you may be able to get just a jack from an electronics parts store and wire it in yourself, but the Keystone plates are probably fine, as long as you have a solid connection (i suppose you could even solder them on inside the wall to make sure they don't go anywhere, but it should be fine)


CablesAmerica sells some RCA keystone jacks here, although in a limited number of colors.

[bmedina]

Even cheaper prices: http://cablewholesale.com

Any decent cable will do. All you pay for in buying hyped-up brands is the name.

[MaxPower2k3]

thanks for that site, i'll keep them in mind next time i need a cable.


And, you're absolutely right, big cable brands (i.e. Monster) offer almost no advantage over regular (cheaper) generic cables. I got a 5m (~16ft) DVI-D cable from cablesamerica for $30 that works perfectly. The same cable from Monster would've been over $200. That's half the price of the TV i hooked it up to. With a digital signal, the bits either make it to the other end of the cable or they don't, so the cable either works or it doesn't. There's no advantage to be had beyond a regular, working cable. With analog signals, it is possible to degrade the signal while it's passing through the cable, but any of the cables from the above sites should not be noticeably different than the much more expensive Monster alternatives.

[Mark E]

component video cables are just standard RCA cables. so you could buy two of those from somewhere, and just not use one of the four connectors.

[MaxPower2k3]

Originally posted by Mark E:
component video cables are just standard RCA cables. so you could buy two of those from somewhere, and just not use one of the four connectors.

RCA cables don't always come in pairs of two. you could get a set of audio cabes + a video cable and that'd work, too, but probably wouldn't be much less than just buying component cables from one of the above websites.

[Zoom]

Originally posted by Mark E:
component video cables are just standard RCA cables. so you could buy two of those from somewhere, and just not use one of the four connectors.

Actually, I don't believe that's true. Video signals are much higher frequency and have different requirements in terms of cable design. They look the same, but they're not. For short distances, it may not matter much. However, for long distances, I believe it can make a big difference.

[Zoom]

Originally posted by MaxPower2k3:
With a digital signal, the bits either make it to the other end of the cable or they don't, so the cable either works or it doesn't. There's no advantage to be had beyond a regular, working cable. With analog signals, it is possible to degrade the signal while it's passing through the cable, but any of the cables from the above sites should not be noticeably different than the much more expensive Monster alternatives.

While I'm 100% sure that you're paying a ridiculous mark-up for Monster branded stuff, it's not true that "either the bits make it or they don't". I'm not an expert, but I do have a masters in EE. Digital signals can degrade, but the causes and effects are different than for analog signals. You can't transmit "bits", you have to represent them on some sort of analog waveform, and there are many ways to do that. It's been too long since I studied all that stuff, but I just wanted to clarify for posterity that the design of a digital cable matters just as much as the design of an analog cable, but the design considerations are very different. I'm sure that you can buy a crappy digital cable and a good digital cable, and under the right circumstances, you could tell the difference between the two.

[bmedina]

That's all true, but any decently-designed cable (read: anything sold commercially) is more than adequate. The equipment used to verify the functionality of the cables is much more precise than our human senses.

Anyone who tells you that you need an expensive cable is either a) trying to make a buck off your naivety, or b) trying to justify their own purchase of said cable. Unfortunately, there's an entire industry comprised of people in the first group, which gives rise to an even larger group of people in the second.

[nerd]

I'm not an expert either but I to work in a TV engineering department. We used to have a 75' - 100' component cable run from one of our camera CCUs to our Ultimatte. I couldn't tell the difference in quality loss over the shorter component cable runs in the building.

I also don't believe in buying expensive cables. We don't go and buy Monster cable to go from tape decks, etc. to our router. For video and stereo audio we use some cable from Clark Wire and Cable and for mono we use some Belden cable that's something like $50 for 500'.

You'll be fine not buying the high end stuff. I would stick to video cable for your video. If I remember right, video has a bigger center conductor to carry the higher bandwidth of video vs audio.

Brad