HDMI Cables

The Ancient World Of RG6 Coaxial Cable Vs Fiber Optics

We're caught between two worlds at the moment. There's still the old world where RG6 coax cable is used to connect up old Coax connectors, then you have the new digital world of super-technical amazing quality fiber optic HDMI cables.

With the Ethernet, you're seeing the same thing. We came from an old 10 MHz Ethernet standard, which then went to 10/100 MHz standard as 100 MHz started replacing the older 10 MHz and poof, the CAT 5 cable was created, which could transfer signals at 100 MHz. Then, the signals started going even higher-speed than that. 

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A category 6 cable can carry 250 MHz (although they oftentimes say 200 MHz); but basically it's most-often used with the old 10/100 Ethernet cards, still. The thought is, cross-talk is better and the signal tends to transfer more clearly with less error if you use the newer CAT 6 standard cable to do your transfers.

RG6 coaxial cable is what is used in low-end video. The RG stands for 'Radio Guide' and coaxial is a kind of cable which has an inner solid wire that goes through the connector and becomes one of the two conductors. An insulator keeps it separated from the 'ground', or outside connector which either can press-on or screw-on to the video connector's barrel (depending upon the type of connector that you purchase).

Then there's the 'new world' of digital connectivity. There, they continue to step up the speed at which the video transfers through the cable. In order to get above 10 GHz, you can't use wire. At those speeds, even the tiniest bit of turn and the wire becomes like a coil. One coiled wire will act like a coil, causing the wire signal to 'ring' like a bell. Also, because the inside wire is close to the outside shield, that acts like a capacitor. This is called 'inductive reactance'. It means that there isn't just pure resistance in a copper wire. There's a 'different kind' of resistance which is dependent upon the small amounts of capacitance exhibited by the wire in conjunction with the minute amounts of inductance (acts like a coil) that's in the wire.

Now, a fiber patch cable doesn't have to worry about such things. It has no wire at all, so there is no inductance. Inductance occurs in a wire. It's a state of electrons and what occurs when electromagnetic waves cut through another copper wire. They start a current going in that wire when the signal coming from one wire passes into another wire. This can't happen with light. When light passes through an optical cable, it doesn't create an encirclement of rotating electromagnetic field to set up around that wire because it's not electronically charged¡­ its light.

So, an ancient RG6 coaxial cable sits next to this wonderful new invention, the fiber optic cable, looking much like it; when in reality they are light-years apart. If you wanted dual cables, going to two different places¡­ with the older world of RG-6 video, you needed a transformer to split the signal. Once you did that, the signal was always affected. It either would be phase-shifted a little, or noise might be introduced. Nowadays, the new optical cables, if you purchase a splitter it will divide the light beam into two parts. Each light beam will have no new noise introduced to it in any way. If it gets to be too bad a signal, it will lose all knowledge of it being a digital signal, which will cause it to break down entirely; but you'll never see a reduction in sound quality otherwise.

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