Wall Plate Requirements
1. Designing home theater system wiring:
Ideally, each design incorporates all validated near-term requirements and thus can be immediately completed in the desired style, fit, and finish. This most certainly includes wall plates.
Sometimes new home customers, especially those installing structured wiring solutions, anticipate other needs and pre-wire to enable future options. In this case, the customer may choose to terminate these wires later.
Common video wiring configurations in recent years have included Composite, S-Video, and Component Video have been ubiquitous along with RGBHV used on projectors, and VGA used on computer video. With HDTV came new configurations capable of higher definition video (such as DVI) along with multi-channels of audio (HDMI). The convenience of a single, high-definition cable with one connection point to do it all is highly desirable.
In summary, know your requirements and anticipated needs. Finish now what you can and pull added wire for likely future needs. Always use quality materials. Unused pre-wire cost at time of initial construction is a fraction of the cost, difficulty, repair, and clean-up your likely to incur later.
2. Most important audio/video connector types:
Today, DVI or HDMI as well as IEEE1394 (Firewire), USB, RJ45 (networks), and provision for one or more RG-6 terminations are the most important.
Earlier mentioned were the pre-eminent values of DVI/HDMI connections. The other connection types deserve further explanation as their future importance may not be obvious even to those familiar with their common use today.
USB, RG-6 (with appropriate termination), RJ-45, and Firewire are quite different and typically serve distinct applications. However, they have some characteristics that keep them in the mix for our continuing interest. These characteristics are:
• They are universal standards, common, and fairly inexpensive
• Each has a capacity for high resolution and high speed digital content and signaling (audio/video and controls)
• Designers have used these standards for new innovations in our converging digital world of communications, computing, and A/V
This last point would not be real if it wasn’t for the first two points. This is the essence of why these four connection types remain important to the consumer. In a digital world, the ability to inexpensively deliver high-resolution imagery and sound to desired locations for a variety of current and still unanticipated applications is very important.
It is important to note that older connection types may be very important in typical environment to enable continued use of existing components.
You may have noticed that newly announced products immediately studied and discussed by enthusiasts. They wonder about the type, number, and flexibility of their digital connections. Flexibly delivering hi-def signals, securely, is critical today.
Content owners need to protect their intellectual capital from wanton, wholesale copying. Yet, they must facilitate easy enjoyment by legitimate consumers. For a solution, designers must have “control” signaling to manage high-resolution streams of encrypted content. The most important of these are the DVI or HMDI and to a much lesser extent IEEE1394. Of course, security is not the only critical element driving future A/V connectivity. Basic technological innovation remains a very strong undercurrent of the entire A/V world. Consider these two recent crossover or hybrid innovations:
• NetStreams DigiLinx products distribute high-resolution data (digital audio content bits and control signals) over an extended network segment of an Ethernet LAN. Polkaudio developed two speaker systems (LC265i-IP and LC80i-IP) that work with NetStreams products and CAT5e networks.
• Coaxsys creates products that impose on a standard RG-6 coax (F connectors) a TCP/IP network. Specifically, this solution adds an IP network in a frequency band above the other standard frequency bands in which local FM and TV broadcasts (via local antennas) and cable TV (standard, digital, and special channels) broadcasts are found.
The above examples demonstrate novel new ways older, but capable, technologies serve high quality audio/video services. Most consumers are unaware that in the first example above, this design has the potential for a closed-loop system to optimize the audio for the room environment. The best known example of a closed-loop room calibration system comes from DEQX with their Calibrated NHT Xd speakers. This solution may be the most significant advance in quality audio in decades.
3. Desired custom wall plate:
The custom wall plate I need requires connections for HDMI, RJ-45, as well as either a special 13-pin connector or four (minimum) RG-6 terminations and ideally up to six. This combination deserves an explanation.
We have already established why the HDMI interface is important and how IP-based speakers may become the solution for taming many rooms. An RJ-45 connector may also obtain your music collection on network-attached servers (NAS) or for accessing Internet radio using your Roku Soundbridge or Slim Devices Squeezebox 3.
Including four, five, or six RG-6 connectors may seem excessive to some. An option described later may offer an elegant alternative. So why would anyone need or want so many RG-6 connections? Flexibility is why! An RG-6 Quadshield cable can deliver, at highest quality, any RF analog or digital audio/video signal of interest.
Versatility can be accomplished using a specific connector type (F, RCA, and BNC) and one or more strands. Briefly, here is a sample list of common interfaces, the connector type, and the number of strands:
• Audio – RCA – 2 (analog, stereo)
• Audio – RCA – 1 (digital audio – stereo; 5.1; and 7.1)
• RF – F – 1 (analog RF antenna signals, cable broadband & TV, and IP computer networking including VOIP telephony)
• Video – RCA – 1 (Composite Video)
• Video – RCA – 3 (Component Video)
• Video – RCA or BNC – 5 (RGBHV – Red, Green, Blue, Horizontal & Vertical sync)
We arrived at a minimum count of four for digital audio and component video. This combination equals what can be delivered (less security) by a single HMDI cable. The maximum of six accounts for digital audio and RGBHV used in many projection situations.
Finally we must discuss computer video (VGA) signals. A variation of VGA is found on most computers. A combination of RG-6 wires can be used to deliver VGA signals by applying conversion connectors sold by several manufacturers. This type of flexibility led to the recent availability of a combination of wiring or bulk cabling.
Liberty markets a wiring product solution (EZ-LINX) that more elegantly achieves this broad flexibility. This solution combines multiple wires with a special 13-pin connector on each end. If this 13-pin connection was built into my custom wall plate with an HMDI and a RJ-45 connector that is really all I would need!
