Tech Question

[chef_manny]

I have a question for all my tech savy friends.  Crystal and I were fortunate enough to purchase a brand new 37" 1080i HDTV.  My question to all of you is, do I really need all those fancy cables that are out there, or can I do just fine with my standard cables?  And if I do need them, is this a good deal?

Comments

[sidbyrd]

If you use a single round-plug cable (often but not always yellow; this is called a composite connection, and the round plug is called an RCA plug) for the video, you won't get HD, and you won't even get the best SD (standard def) picture. The best SD comes from three RCA-plug cables (red, green, and blue; called a component connection). You might not have noticed the difference on your old TV, but on the new nicer one, there should be a noticeable jump going from composite to component for SD. This is the best connection for you Wii, for example, because the Wii doesn't make an HD signal. (The Wii, unfortunately, requires a special Wii-only component cable because Nintendo wants all your money.)

If you have a device that produces an HD signal, like HD cable or an upscaling DVD player, you will only see the HD if you use the three-cable component connection or if you use HDMI, which is a single cable but has a flat-ish plug with lots of separate tiny gold connections inside. Between those two options, HDMI is a little better just because you don't have to worry so much about cable quality (since it's digital, not analog) and because there's only one cable to mess with.

For audio, you are probably currently using two RCA-plug cables, one red and one white. That's fine unless you want surround sound, in which case you need a digital audio cable, which is usually a thin optical cable called Toslink but which can also be done on a single RCA-plug cable, depending on which kind of jacks your equipment has. Both of those connections are called S/PDIF, because they're the same thing, just with a different kind of cable. The other option for surround sound is HDMI-unlike any other kind of video connection, HDMI can also do audio. This requires that you run the cable first to whatever box powers your speakers, and then to the display, but not all speakers support this. If yours don't, it's no big loss; you'll just have to use a separate cable for audio.

As for that cable kit: it includes several cables you don't need, and it's not a particularly amazing deal. Check monoprice.com for cheap cables of all kinds; that's where I bought most of mine.