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DVIGear Custom AV Wall Plates

Move into a new home and any respectable audioholic will quickly find himself looking around and planning cable runs for home theater. DVIGear is here to help you make the right connections. From their unparalleled build quality and performance of their HDMI 1.3a 1080p compliant cables to their custom accessory items, DVIGear has got you covered.

Impact Acoustics Digital RapidRun Cable Review

Thought you couldn't terminate HDMI and DVI in the field? Guess again. Impact Acoustics' Digital RapidRun cabling system solves a huge problem for the DIY home owner or CE installer.

Recent Cables & Interconnects Articles

Tech Article: Myth vs Reality – Putting Cat5E-Based A/V Structured Wiring In Its Place
by Joseph D. Cornwall — last modified October 06, 2008 08:46

Sending audio, video and control signals over twisted pair cables have become common practice in the contemporary marketplace. There is a good reason for this. Twisted pair cables are cheap, ubiquitous and comfortably familiar to anyone with any level of installation exposure to data networking and telephony. UTP-based A/V installations are appealing for their perceived low cost and performance advantages. Widely accepted as a panacea that banished the need for task-specific cables to the equipment closet of history, those who universally advocate the use of balun-based infrastructure would do well to remember the words of Plutarch; “To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.”

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Tech Article: Wireless HDMI Takes Flight
by Tom Andry — last modified September 05, 2008 11:41

Wireless HDMI seems to be coming to a living room near you. While everyone pretty much agrees that HDMI is the most bitter-sweet invention to hit the consumer AV electronics industry in some time, there's no denying that most are trying to make end runs around the format. In some cases that is through the use of cable conversion, while others are looking to send HDMI through the ether.

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Tech Article: Long HDMI Cable Bench Tests - Monster Cable Shootout
by Clint DeBoer — last modified July 08, 2008 06:50

I decided to write this article the first time I saw another writer say "HDMI is digital - it either works or it doesn't." Then I saw that statement get repeated over and over. The problem is that HDMI isn't like a digital coax audio cable - it can degrade partially and produce sparkles and snow. We'll illustrate some of this below. It took nearly 6 months to research and prepare for this experiment. I intended to acquire as many HDMI cables as possible and focus on empirical testing of mostly longer lengths to show the differences that abound when you exceed 5 meters. The exercise, I believed, would save many consumers from losing lots of money and time - on a number of levels.

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Tech Article: Pear Cable Redux: How to Combat Scam with Science
by David Waratuke — last modified May 13, 2008 08:43

A Case Study in Applying an Audioholics A/V Education to Identify Marketing Drivel. In this follow-up to our initial article, we will look at Pear Cable as a case study in evaluating exaggerated marketing claims about the audio performance improvements attributed to cables. We will use known science, established engineering principles, and the educated opinions of well known audio engineering practitioners to look for contradictory statements, mistakes and misuse of engineering knowledge, and exaggeration of the audible significance to certain aspects of audio performance.

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Tech Article: Speaker Cable Gauge (AWG) Guidelines & Recommendations
by Gene DellaSala — last modified January 21, 2008 11:15

Lately we’ve been getting hit with the common question “what speaker wire gauge should I use”? More often than not, we’ve seen Audiophiles choose a higher gauge esoteric wire over a lower gauge generic zip cord cable simply because they were sold some marketing nonsense that these magic cables would improve your systems mojo. This guide cuts through the nonsense and gives some solid recommendations on selecting speaker wire gauge based on cable length and impedance of your loudspeakers.

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Tech Article: HDMI 1.3 and Cables Part 1: It's All in the Bitrate
by Clint DeBoer — last modified February 12, 2008 00:37

With the advent of HDMI v1.3 and 1.3a, consumers are starting to really get confused about cables and what they need to worry about when selecting a product that's going to be compatible with the new specifications. We interviewed Steven Barlow from DVIGear to get a handle on why this is a more complex issue for some, and a non-issue for others. He allowed us to assimilate much of what we discussed into this article you are reading now.

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Editorial: What's the Matter with HDMI?
by Kurt Demke — last modified May 18, 2007 19:04

HDMI, as we've pointed out elsewhere, is a format which was designed primarily to serve the interests of the content-provider industries, not to serve the interests of the consumer. The result is a mess, and in particular, the signal is quite hard to route and switch, cable assemblies are unnecessarily complicated, and distance runs are chancy. Why is this, and what did the designers of the standard do wrong? And what can we do about it? Check out this informative article from our friends at Bluejeans Cable.

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Tech Article: Bi-wiring Part 2: The Cable Conundrum
by Jim Lesurf — last modified March 28, 2007 20:00

One of the arguments presented in the web forum thread I’ve already examined on a previous article is that there is a difference between a bi-wired speaker system and conventional wiring due to a difference in their cable power dissipation behaviours. So let’s examine the systems described in the thread and see what difference there may be between them in practice.

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Tech Article: Bi-Wiring From Amplifier To Loudspeaker
by Jim Lesurf — last modified March 20, 2007 16:03

“Bi-wiring” is a controversial topic. Some people are quite certain it makes an audible difference. Some others are convinced that it can’t actually make any difference at all. The purpose of this analysis is to try and decide whether it is at least theoretically feasible that bi-wiring can make any difference. This is a tech article meant for propeller heads and not a general overview.

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Tech Article: Thinking in Isolation – A Primer on Ground Loops
by Joseph D. Cornwall — last modified December 05, 2007 05:44

There is a humming sound coming from the speakers. A faint dark bar rolls from the bottom of the image to the top, changing colors and distorting the picture as it goes. What’s this? How is this possible? All this equipment is new and your home is only a few years old. Welcome to the nefarious neighborhood of the ground loop! This article details how to resolve a ground loop to help you achieve noise free connection of your equipment.

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DVIGear Custom AV Wall Plates

Impact Acoustics Digital RapidRun Cable Review

Recent Cables & Interconnects Articles

Cables and Interconnects