Your Best S-Video Connection Can Be Your Longest Connection

	Your Cart is Empty
	View Cart

	Computer Cables
	Audio Cables
	Video Cables
	Structured Wiring
	Hookup Guides
		Affordable Home Theater
		Why Digital Satellite Deserves Special Treatment
		Audio Cables Maximize The Home-Theatre Experience
		Home Theater Speaker Hook-Up: Doing It Right
		How Interference Gets Into Your System, How To Stop It
		Monster Connections, making the complex less confusing
		Monster's POD Cleans Up Your Cable Clutter
		Getting The Best Performance From RCA Connectors
		Your Best S-Video Connection Can Be Your Longest Connection
		Tips For a Great Picture
		Choosing Between S Video, Composite or RF For the Job.
	About Us

Connections Tips by Noel Lee

These articles are an excellent read for Home AV enthusiasts who want to take their system to the next level. Written by the Head Monster - Noel Lee.
more >>

Your Best S-Video Connection Can Be Your Longest Connection

Most home-theater experts say that the farthest you should run an S-video cable is about 10 feet. And for the most part, they're right. When designing S-video cables, too many manufacturers concentrate on making the cable as thin and inexpensive as possible. Thus, they compromise the quality of the cable, and obviously poor picture quality results.

S-video cables carry the color and brightness (chrominance and luminance) parts of the video signal separately. To carry these signals, S-video cable has to consist of two separate cables in one jacket. Most manufacturers try to cram two miniature cables into the same size jacket you'd normally use for one. This process tends to change the impedance of the cable, resulting in signal loss and a bad picture.

Video cables are supposed to have a consistent 75-ohm impedance through the connectors and the cable. When you alter this, as far too many video cables do, you get a loss in signal strength, especially at higher frequencies. The color signal in the video we watch in the U.S. and Canada at a very high bandwidth, 3.58 megahertz, so it suffers more from signal loss than the brightness signal, most of which occupies much lower frequencies. The result can be a severe decrease in color when you run mediocre S-video cable at lengths of 15 feet or longer. In some cases, you get almost no color at all!

For the average living room, that's no good. Many people keep all their video gear in a rack, do the video switching with an A/V receiver or a Dolby Digital/DTS preamp/processor, and run one long cable across the room to a big-screen TV. That usually means a run of at least 25 feet. It's even worse if you have ceiling mounted front projector, which often requires a cable run of 50 feet.

But long runs of S-video cable are not a problem with Monster Cable. As far back as the 1996 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, we demonstrated that our S-video cables can carry signals as far as any homeowner could every need. Whether we used our affordable Monster Video® 2, our mid-priced Monster Video® 3, or our top-of-the-line M series Silver Video® S-video cable, the color looked as good as if the cable were only a few feet long.

Why do Monster S-video cables so greatly outperform our competitors' cables? Because we don't compromise. We use the same high quality manufacturing techniques and standards for our S-video cable as we do for our composite and component video cables. We maintain a consistent 75-ohm impedance throughout the cable through the use of an injected dielectric that preserves the impedance even when you bend the cable. We bond our cable shields to the dielectrics, so that they won't separate. (With other cables, the shield often separates from the dielectric, moving further from the center conductor and changing the impedance of the cable.) And we use a double shield-braid and foil-to minimize interference at all frequencies of the video spectrum. We manufacture S-video cable in standard lengths, and if you need an extra-long cable, we'll custom-build it for you.

So don't worry if you need to run long lengths of S-video cable. As long as you stick to Monster Cable, your S-video signals will arrive at your TV set picture-perfect.