I was reading the talk about cables and how the ones out of the box are not that good. So I took a look at what I had since I knew I had a spare Monster cable set (RCA) and a spare Monster video cable.

#1 Is a coax digital cable the same as a regular (RCA?) video cable? They look pretty similar except the coax digital cable is really thin compared to the Monster cable.

#2 Also, am I really likely to see a difference between a 99 cent S-video cable from Recoton and a Monster S-video cable I find at Best Buy? I don't have a fancy setup.

#3 Finally, which would be better coax or RCA from my sat dish to my VCR?

Thanks,

Paks



This message was edited by Paksen on 12/03/01 19:45.01.

Pax, the rating from worst to best for interconnecting audio/video is like so:

1) Coax (actually, coxial cable is ANY shielded cable with a single inner conductor, but here we're referring to RG-59 & RG-6 w/F-connectors, that carry an RF signal, with both video and audio signals)

2) RCA interconnects, with the video on a single shielded cable, and the audio on a) a single cable carrying mono, b) two cables carrying stereo, which can be encoded with ProLogic-decodeable surround sound, c) a single cable or an optical (fiber-optic) "cable" carrying a digital signal, which can contain anywhere from one to six or seven channels.

3) A combination of an S-video (which itself comprises two shielded cables, with the black-&-white info (the Y-component of the video signal (luminance)) on one and the color info (the C-component (chrominance)) on the other) and an RCA cable, with the same possibilities of the audio as in #2.

4) Component video, of which there are a few varieties, which can use three, four, or five shielded cables (I won't go into the differences here), along with the same choices of audio as in #2.


Now, to answer your Q's:

1) Yes, the cables are the same, in as much as the quality itself being the same. The Monster cable is thicker because it's a Monster Cable cable. What makes one cable a video and another an audio is how the provider lables it. If I had one good cable and one poorer cable, I'd use the better one on the video.

A quality shielded cable can carry digital audio or video, although, in theory, a digital cable could be a piece of crap, because the nature of digital signals is such that, if the signal arrives intact, it contains all the info needed to re-construct the complete audio signal.

Video is (except for the content of DVD and digital recorders) is an analog signal, so the cable used is required to be of high quality. However, as a matter of course, it's a preference to use a higher-quality interconnect even with digital audio for physical reasons, too.

2) In my opinion, yes, and the longer the cable, the more so.

3) The RCAs.

Larry

One small comment. I believe that all of the Monster Cable for Audio is made from what is commonly referred to as "microphone cable". This cable consists of a twisted pair surrounded by some kind of shield arrangement (braid foil etc.)

I would not recommend using the Monster audio cables for Video. A standard video cable will have better bandwidth.

Dave