Is the cable different between RCA and Component? [Archive] - Audio & Video Forums

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m500
04-13-2005, 10:24 AM
Is the cable different between RCA and Component? They look exactly the same to me. Please shade some light into this. I hate to waste my money on a new set of cable just rename to Component.

hermanv
04-30-2005, 11:42 AM
In the old days there was a connection for TVs called composite. It was a coax cable with RCA jacks on the end with the jacks usually colored yellow. It carried both luminance and chrominance information mulitplexed into a signal called baseband video.

Today there is a new video signal transfer method called component. This usually involves three cables carrying either red, green and blue signals or a combination where the red, green and blue are mixed with luminance. These are also coax cables.

To confuse things, there was a term called component stereo this reffered to those people that had a series of seperate boxes (for example: tuner, pre-amp, power amp) and needed a series of component cables to interconnect them. These were not coax.

The most important thing to know about a cable is whether we are talking a video (or digital audio) signal or a standard audio interconnect. Both the video and digital audio signals require a controlled impedance cable called coax to acheive good results, these kinds of cables will typically say coax or 75 Ohms on the packaging. Whereas audio interconnects are usually higher impedance and the equipment won't do near as well if you use coax cable.

All of these usually use RCA jacks isn't that nice?

JBMAudio.com
05-24-2005, 05:56 PM
Is the cable different between RCA and Component? They look exactly the same to me. Please shade some light into this. I hate to waste my money on a new set of cable just rename to Component.

This depends on the maker of the cable. That aside, RCA's usually aren't 75 ohms and component video should be. So when buying Component Video, make sure it is a 75 ohm cable. IF your RCA is a 75 ohm cable, you can use it as component video.