Choosing Connector Cables for a Home Theater

Video Transcript

"Hello, Reggie Hayes here with Expert Village. Now let?s take a time out for a second and talk about connectors. Pay very close attention because what we cover here is going to be referenced a lot later on when we go to hooking up all these components. Let?s say you go to the store and you see all these cables and all these connectors. How do you know what you need? What does what? Well let?s talk about it. This right here is your basic cable for cable television. It's called an RF cable. It stands for radio frequency. If you notice it has the shield right here and then a little point right in here. You want to make sure that right there stays intact and centered when you go to hooking it up. It's very important. That's pretty much it for this cable, it just carries basic cable, and it's analog. These right here are also more analog cables. They carry both audio and video. Video is always going to be yellow on these cables. Your audio is always going to be red and white. These are called patch cables. If you notice the ends are the same, and they come in various sizes and they are also analog/video. Other video, which is also analog is going to be your s-video. S-video does not carry audio. If you have one of these you are going to need to use these red and whites to bring in your audio with the s-video, but it is a better picture than the yellow, than the composite. S-video has 4 pins where as composite only has 2. That's what makes it better. They can be a little difficult to hook up sometimes cause you have to force them in there. Getting into digital video, you have component right here. Component splits the three main video colors up. You've got the primary colors red, blue, and green. These do not carry audio, they are just video. Getting into audio, as we said we've got our red and white, but we can also get into digital audio. Digital audio can come in the form, look here, looks like a composite video cable. This one's black, orange is usually the color for it, but it is a digital audio. You can get Dolby digital and THX audio out of these cables right here. The last audio cable is what we call a toss-link right here. It's a fiber optic cable and these are a little more expensive. They use light, transmitted through these wires right here to process audio. It is very crisp and very clean audio. So that's pretty much it for hooking up your cables and knowing what each cable does and what they do. If you look at video cable or an audio cable, try to decide first of all what it does. If it is going to be audio or if it's going to be video, it's going to help you out."