Connection Types

When you're purchasing the different pieces of your Home Theater system, it is important to keep a couple of things in mind. Obviously issues of price, size are important, but connection types are crucial.

Whether or not your Home Theater components have certain inputs or outputs on them not only dictates what you can hook up to them, (High Definition TV, DVD Player, etc), but also determines the quality of your picture and sound when playing movies and music. Doesn't make a whole lot sense? Well look at the following diagram that shows what kind of final result you can expect with a variety of options based on the quality of the connections.



Clearly, the above is the worst picture ever. BUT, it'll do find for our purposes here. So imagine if you will that the "SOURCE" is some form of media...whether it be a DVD, your cable, or a CD player. The "RECEIVER" is pretty self explanatory as is "OUTPUT". The biggest thing to get out of this diagram is that the receiver is intercepting the source before it makes it's way to your tv, speakers, whatever. (This is the common Home Theater setup). The following chart shows the final output of your video.

SOURCE decent good best best

RECEIVER good decent good best

OUTPUT decent decent good best

For clarification, let's look at the first line, decent->good->decent. What's an example of this? That's like when you get into an apartment that doesn't have cable so you get the good ol' bunny ear antenna. And if course you want to tape the latest Simpsons so you hook that up to your VCR. And then you want to hook your VCR up to your tv so you do that.

So where does the decent, good, and best come from? Well, on most bunny ears you connect that via what's called a coaxial RF or F-Type connection. That's really considered decent nowadays. You connect that to your VCR and then you connect your VCR to your TV with Composite/RCA cords. You find these on most everything today from game systems to dvd players, they're good but definitely not the best.

So in summary, you started out with an OK signal, connected it to the VCR and then connected that to the TV via a good connection. So kids what have we learned from all of this? If you start out with a not-so good signal, you're gonna end up with a not-so good signal. If you start out with a good signal or connection but you don't maintain the quality through your various connections, you're gonna end up with something less than what you started with.

Coaxial, Optical, S-Video, what the devil does all this mean!? Well, we're not gonna leave you in the dark anymore! To be able to use the knowledge you just learned, you better be able to determine which connections are best. To do that, read page 2 of this article!

1, Page 2 (Analog Connections Explained)--> 3

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