AV cabling - cat5 vs Coax?

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guydewdney

guydewdney

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ok - 50 feet run.

noisy (runs are parallel to mains cables)

RCA or phono at both ends.

cat5? Coax (if so - which? just good double shielded?) or cat5 with baluns?

I have a pile of equipemt in one room (the pc / media room) and the amp in the other (living room) as have been strongly, and unequivibly reccomended... long interconnects, short speaker cables.

I'm trying to hide all the equipment (tivo, cd player, dvd player, zone controller, second area amp, dvd recorder etc etc...) yet have good quality sound.

To give an idea of the level of SQ im after
Yamaha RXV1200RDS amp
Elac CL102 speakers

Im going to make my own cables to the right length, with good quality gold plated connectors. Some of the cables are digital (CD / dvd etc) , some are analog (tivo... um....)

The same applies for the video - which currently is all SD - not HD (yet....) very HQ HDMI cables will just do the length I need, or need a repeater...

anyway - any opinions? Should I just crack out the soldering iron and see if I can tell the difference between cat5 and coax over this length?
 
Put in decent quality HDMI cables (not necessarily very very expensive, but ask around for good quality). Forget the rest.

I redid my setup about a year ago, and didn't put HDMI in - I put in a bunch of high quality oxygen free copper for RCA, pulled through some special shielded cables for a couple of scarts, and so on, but the idea of HDMI didn't even enter my mind. Now I regret it horribly.

HDMI will transfer both audio and video. Use it for everything, get an amp that will upscale, and forget about the rest. That's what I'll be doing (well I'll probably leave the component video cabling ;-)

-simon
 
guydewdney said:
ok - 50 feet run.

noisy (runs are parallel to mains cables)

RCA or phono at both ends.

cat5? Coax (if so - which? just good double shielded?) or cat5 with baluns?

I have a pile of equipemt in one room (the pc / media room) and the amp in the other (living room) as have been strongly, and unequivibly reccomended... long interconnects, short speaker cables.

I'm trying to hide all the equipment (tivo, cd player, dvd player, zone controller, second area amp, dvd recorder etc etc...) yet have good quality sound.

To give an idea of the level of SQ im after
Yamaha RXV1200RDS amp
Elac CL102 speakers

Im going to make my own cables to the right length, with good quality gold plated connectors. Some of the cables are digital (CD / dvd etc) , some are analog (tivo... um....)

The same applies for the video - which currently is all SD - not HD (yet....) very HQ HDMI cables will just do the length I need, or need a repeater...

anyway - any opinions? Should I just crack out the soldering iron and see if I can tell the difference between cat5 and coax over this length?
Click to expand...

Equipment .... cutting edge.

Cables ..... whatever

I would think it through carefully.
 
As Simon says (hmmm, reminds me of primary school :p); go HDMI. I recently laid 20 odd meters of HDMI in one of our houses, exclusively for video transfer. I then laid over 300m (in segments) of CAT6 (shielded, twisted solid core) cabling around the house for data transfer.

Don't regret it one bit! I can stream the data from anywhere in the house to anywhere in the house, and if I'm in the living room, the connection from the pc (video processor, recorder, dvd player, and just about everythign else) to the projector and amp are done via HDMI. It IS a little on the expensive side compared to CAT5e cabling... but its worth it!

Edit: I found it was worth investing in a wall-mountable box to terminal the HDMI cable.
 
I can add cable very very easily - the room has an openable channel for this very purpose.

all cables are under the channel, and all terminations are in floor boxes. The channel also houses the mains cables, and the network cables, and some high frequency flourecents (to give a wall wash lighting effect). There are 3 channels within the channel to separate the various cables (this is a crude copy of the cable trays you find in aeroplanes to provide a shield from one cable to the next.)

HDMI - ok - how to I output from my steam powered tivo (analogue RCA) to HDMI? Why would Iwant to? I have a basic scaler (iscan pro) to convert RCA to VGA on video... god knows how much a composite to hdmi scaler is... :eek:

Equipment is not that cutting edge - its good (ish), but its all out dated.
 
guydewdney said:
I can add cable very very easily - the room has an openable channel for this very purpose.

all cables are under the channel, and all terminations are in floor boxes. The channel also houses the mains cables, and the network cables, and some high frequency flourecents (to give a wall wash lighting effect). There are 3 channels within the channel to separate the various cables (this is a crude copy of the cable trays you find in aeroplanes to provide a shield from one cable to the next.)

HDMI - ok - how to I output from my steam powered tivo (analogue RCA) to HDMI? Why would Iwant to? I have a basic scaler (iscan pro) to convert RCA to VGA on video... god knows how much a composite to hdmi scaler is... :eek:

Equipment is not that cutting edge - its good (ish), but its all out dated.
Click to expand...


You may as well convert the whole thing into a PC based system and stream the video as MPEG4 over a Gigabit lan. You can then stockpile all of your DVD's into MP4 devices.

Ever looked at using a PC as a video switch ?
 
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

media PCs dont seem to have the input function - any ideas where to look?
 
There are graphics cards that have analogue video input as well as output. Look for "VIVO" (Video In, Video Out) in the description.

Can't you "rip" a DVD from the PC's own DVD drive? (Must admit I don't know much about that. I thought it was technically feasible but of questionable legality, due to the copy protection on the discs?)
 
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ok- but at what sort of quality? surely this is going to be an expensive solution? or is it just me?
 
I'd use a dedicated power amp (like a Quad 405) and locate it very near to the speakers. Then run a line-level output from the pre-amp to the power amp using good-quality shielded audio cable (ie, not Cat-5 or coax) from someone like Canford Audio, Studio Spares, etc

If you need more than two channels just add extra power amps

Cat-5 and Coax are not designed for audio therefore I wouldn't recommend them. Audio is not like digital data - it's picky stuff and every step taken to improve the setup pays dividends

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk
 
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guydewdney said:
ok- but at what sort of quality? surely this is going to be an expensive solution? or is it just me?
Click to expand...

1/ Data silo. Any network attached storage or USB external drive attached to a D-Link STORAGE router. This is the central data point and allows easy access to the data from any of the remote viewing devices.

Look at Thecus for low cost LAN server storage with RAID. www.thecus.com.
For routers D-Link has the routers for USB external.

2/ Ripping DVD's. Totally legal if you own the original. DVDShrink is the king and its free. Do it once and forget about it.

3/ Viewing device. A lan capable MP4 playback controller that streams video / photo / MP4 / MP3 / Divx across the LAN to the TV. Cost around 100 pounds.

http://www.cooldrives.com/portable-divx-player-35-hdd-usb2-mp3-mpeg4-avi.html

This stuff is so new and moving so fast that 6 months ago reviews are irrelevant. It can operate with or without a HDD. With a HDD it has local storage and without it is just a user terminal.

4/ Video input: Use a "Miro" card or any one of the "conversion solutions" for tape to digital. These bundles usually include the card needed and also you have CCTV security input cards with quadview and camera selection. Each camera is more or less just a Composite stereo input.

5/ MS home cinema. If you want a more expensive system then you can also look at a PC based solution for recording and switching. I presume that Tivo is still the best on the market but I cant understand why there is no network version or a Soft-Tivo for PC systems.

6/ PC tuner for HDTV: I think that Hauppage has the best reputation in AU.
 
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