So I’ve got a new HDTV on the way. I haven’t yet purchased the mountain of cables I’ll need to hook up the cable box, DVD, PS2, etc. But I was horrified by the prices of most of these accessories. Of course, RadioShack and BestBuy want nothing more than for you to purchase Monster Cables…and I already know that that brand has dubious benefits. I’ll steer clear of the overpriced snake oil, thank you.
So I started checking out the lower-price options. And in my looking, it seemed to me that these component video cable sets look an awful lot like regular RCA cable. Is this right? Is there anything special about them at all aside from the fact that they’re color coded?
If they are, as I suspect, nothing more than conveniently labeled sets of cables, I would be a lot better off getting some good quality RCA cables of any old color (like a yellow/red/white AV bundle) and using those. I’m a pretty smart guy, and I think I could handle the difficult three-to-three mapping involved in using cables that aren’t color coded for dummies.
Yes, they are just RCA cables, but you definitely need good quality ones. The signal has much higher frequencies in it than simple audio or even SDTV. Obviously as long as you match them up correctly, the actual colors of the cables vs. the colors of the connectors is meaningless. Here’s the answer a friend of mine who used to work with high definition hardware gave when I asked him the very same question:
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Part of my difficulty is that my HD set hangs on the wall, so cable changes are fairly difficult, so I wanted to get a reasonably priced but quality set the first time around. If you can just swap out cables on the fly to try out different types, that’s probably your best bet. Don’t bother with Monster though - the set I wound up using was a $15-20 GE set from Circuit City.
Check with your cable company as well - mine (Comcast) actually provided a set for the cable box to TV connection - I only had to come up with a set for the DVD player.
And to hijack a bit - if your cable company has it available where you live, get an HD DVR box. It’s quickly become indispensable in our house.
Oh, no need to tell me twice about HD DVR. I have a DVR now from Time Warner, and I couldn’t live without it. A small part of the reason I waited so ling to move to HD was waiting on the High-Def DVR to become available.
I guess it might be good to check with them to see if they include the cables. I’ll still need them for the other equipment.
I’m pretty much a die hard home theater geek, and I agree that Monster, while not awful, is incredibly overpriced. Check out the link below for Blue Jeans cables. While they are not the “prettiest” cables, they offer top notch construction at reasonable prices. (I have no link to them, but have happily used their cables for a couple of years) If you want to go totally nuts with this stuff, check out the AVS forum at http://www.avsforum.com/ http://bluejeanscable.com/store/component/componentprices.htm
Nope! Those yellow/red/white trios are for composite video and audio and will make a mess of component video as the audio cables will only pass signal up to around 100 KHz or so - the 6+ MHZ for component signals will be clobbered.
You can use any ol’ cables with RCA plugs, but you have to be sure they’re all video cables. RF cable will also work (eg: RG-6 coax) if they have RCA plugs. Also, you need the three cables to be reasonably the same length, or timing differences caused by different lengths can smear the picture.
One low price outfit I found is Monoprice very cheap quality seems decent, at least for the 1 cable I bought from them. They have detailed descriptions, and use a higher grade, better shielded, cable for video signals than they use for audio. My understanding is that video signals are more prone to interference and should be carried by a well shielded cable, audio signals are less affected.
While your regular old rca cables may work, not any old rca cable will do.
Component video cables by standard are 75-ohm. So you can buy any brand component cable (wal-mart, recoton, monster) and it will work fine.
Not all composite cables (red-white-yellow) are 75-ohm. And cheaper ones are probably not. But if you happen to have a higher quality composite cable or find a good price on one and you know that it is at least 75-ohm, then you can use it instead of buying a more expensive component cable.
Not the freebies that came in the box with anything I’ve bought recently. The video cable is distinctly larger than the adjoining audio cables. In really broad and generalized terms (ignoring fat Monster-type cables), if it’s not about 1/4" diameter or more, it’s not coax and not going to work well for video.
You don’t want at least 75 Ohms, you want exactly 75 Ohms - at least to within a few percent. Anything much higher or lower can lead to losses and interference due to unintended signal reflection. To minimize losses and maximize clean signal transfer, you want to match source, cable, and load impedances as closely as possible.