16 Aug
2014
16 Aug
'14
2:50 a.m.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 09:11:45AM -0600, ben wrote:
You're not looking terribly hard.
My first port of call is Amazon because I'm lazy and my housemate has Prime so
I get free next-day delivery. I searched for "phono cable" on amazon.co.uk to
see what came back. The first page of results had five of those ultra-crappy
ones, around the ?2-3 mark, and ten that look reasonable starting at ?4. If I
was actually looking for one, my search would stop here.
If I don't care if I get an ultra-crappy cable, there's Poundland. A ?1 phono
lead is only fit for the bin, but their USB and HDMI cables are useful if not
terribly durable.
Where I care about sound quality, I go to Richer Sounds, a specialist
box-shifter with a good high-street presence so you can have a play before
buying. Their leads can venture into snake oil territory -- ?9.99 for an
Ethernet cable!? -- but there are a few plausible ones in amongst it.
Your nostalgia is getting the better of you. I'll take HDMI over the wide
variety of incompatible connectors for RGB video in the 80s and 90s, especially
the infernal SCART plug which was apparently *designed* to fall out of the back
of the telly.
(Note that most HDMI woes are due to HDCP deliberately going out of its way to
break things, so don't buy anything that does that. I did once accidentally buy
something that forced HDCP and therefore didn't work, but I just returned it
under SoGA as not as described / not fit for purpose.)
On 8/15/2014 5:47 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
[...]
The problem
is, ultra-crappy and ultra-long cables are standard, as they
come with consumer-grade kit. Anybody who gives even the slightest damn
about audio quality should replace them. However, you don't need anything
fancy: if you're paying more than ten quid, they saw you coming.
But they
don't sell medium priced cables any more. I tend to
repurpose the crappy cables for S/PDIF and composite video,
neither of which need such a wide SNR, just so long as there's not too much
attenuation at a few MHz.
The problem with consumer stuff is you get a new
standard every week with a
new cable. I am sure that you had better connector out in the 1950's than the
5 cent RCA stuff, but it cost a good bit more. Ben.