Ask The Installer
with John Chance of The Home Theater ConnectionAdvice on home theater, audio, and video

(originally printed in May. 2007 edition of Sound & Vision Magazine)

Q. I’m about to purchase a whole-house video and audio distribution
system and I’m being told that I can tranfer HD picture quality round the house using double Cat-5e connections without loss of picture quality. It sounds too good to be true. Is it?

Kapil Wadhwani / via email

A. JOHN CHANCE, Owner, The Home Theater Connection,
Staten Island, NY, says:

Yes, it’s true. It’s accomplished by using what’s called a video balun, and it can support HDTV (720p,
1080i/p) transmission via component video converted
to Cat-5e with wire runs up to 1,000 feet.

Video baluns convert unbalanced video into a balanced
signal format that’s more immune to noise and interference, and can be transmitted over long
lengths of Cat-5e with very little signal loss. Twopiece systems, with a transmitter on one end and a receiver on the other, can be purchased from companies such as Knoll Systems (knollsystems.com) and AudioControl (audiocontrol.com).
These typically include onnections for transferring audio as well, hence the double Cat-5e you mention.

Of course, once you have video in your remote rooms, how will you turn your source components on and off or change channels? Radio frequency (RF) remote controls or IR repeaters will do the trick. But that’s a whole other topic! (For more on baluns and extended cable runs, see “For
the Long Run” in “Feedback,” page 10.)

 

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