Cheap digital coax cables? (1 Viewer)

[JohnGoggan]

I feel stupid having to ask this, but I just can't find the info anywhere... Do I need anything "special" for a coax digital cable? I mean -- just shielded, right? I currently use a nice Panasonic player as my primary DVD -- with it's optical cable. I recently picked up a cheap Daewoo DVG-4000S just for SVCD playback and other mucking about and it has only a coax digital output. While all of the local stores have tons of cheap optical cables, they don't seem to have just a basic digital coax cable... Am I just not looking for the right thing? Can I just go to the electronics/video department and buy a "standard" composite video cable or the audio section for some cheap cable and use either of those? -- or will it not be shielded properly for use as digital coax?

I don't want to have to order some higher end stuff (like I did for my other connections -- both optical and component video) just to get this rarely-used DVD player connected with digital coax.

Thanks!

- John...

 

[Jed M]

Any shielded rca type cable should work. A nice cheap composite video cable would do fine.

 

[Brian Fellmeth]

Yeah. The ones with the yellow sleaves designed to carry a video signal from one RCA jack to another- carrying a digital signal is almost the same thing (electrically), so the cable specification for video RCA's make a good digital coax cable too. Most of the $20-$40 "digital" cables are just these relabled for marketing purposes.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Any shielded rca type cable should work

As Brian said: you need to make sure you use a VIDEO cable. All video cables are made with 75 ohm coax. Audio cables are more often made with 50 ohm coax (and NO, they are not marked).

People HAVE used audio cables by mistake, and it appears to work. But the audio during a DVD movie would drop-out every few minutes. One guy had it happen about every 15 minutes (so infrequent that he ignored it), another had the sound drop out every minute or so. He was ready to take his new system back as it frustrated him, until he discovered the cable issue.

 

[Frank Zimkas]

I just picked up a couple of Acoustic Research Digital Coax Cables (1meter)from BB for about $12 each.

 

[Vincent_S]

I just bought one from www.heartlandcables.com. I don't know if it is out of your price range but it was $22 shipped. And excellent build quality I might add.