What makes a Component cable a Component cable?
 

I received my Toshiba A1 yesterday afternoon. :banana:

Belatedly, I realized that my box-o-cables was devoid of component cables. After cursing myself for not thinking ahead, I took a look at my existing component cables. What made them special? Are they really nothing more than insulated copper wire with a pretty colored RCA jack on the end? Sure look that way...

I had a bunch of nice quality directional audio cables in my box, and pulled out 3. Hooked 'em up, and...surprise! They transmit component video signals wonderfully. So maybe this is a stupid question (wouldn't be my 1st), but is there anything special about a component cable? Maybe some type of magic pixie dust that I don't know about??????

Cable experts, enlighten me!

Not really. Technically you can take composite cables and use them for component. A good set of Component cables should be well insultated and have good connectors. If you have audio cables that are like that, there is no problem using those.

Audio cables may or may not work. No way to tell until you try them. And technically, component cables need to be 75 Ohm. Generally speaking, video cables work fine with audio but not the other way around.

50 ohm audio cables will "work" for transmitting component video, but you might get some signal degradation.

Any three decently-shielded 75 ohm RCA cables will work fine for component video.

If they are directional audio cables, you may see some grounding issues or other problems. "Directional" usually means that the shield is not attached at one end, to break the ground and avoid amp/grounding issues. This is not appropriate for video use if you have a discerning eye.

How do you think these problems would manifest themselves? I did some pretty critical viewing last night, and now that I think about it, I did notice what appeared to be very fine "scan lines"...I'll have to look again tonight in case it was just my imagination.

I ordered some new cables from Monoprice this morning, just to be anal. It'll be interesting to do an A/B comparison and see if there's a difference.

This wouldn't always happen, sometimes the picture might be perfectly fine.

I once had interference artifacts from poor cables. They were shaped like a sine wave, although vertical. It wasn't actually an obvious line, see below. Sometimes it was just a vertical bar, about an inch across on my 27" set, I still see this constantly on some stations, where the problem must be introduced before the signal goes to DirecTV since I see it on nothing else.

I'm not sure how to describe it. The whole picture would be there, but you'd see the shape of the line, similar to the shadows and other "3D" edges of windows on a computer screen. Like it was a 3D edge that didn't belong there, scrolling through the picture. The wave version was hard to see (easiest on a large solid color like a blue menu screen), the vertical bar blatantly obvious.

Scan lines might just be scan lines.

Monoprice has a halfway decent return policy, but I doubt you'll choose to use it.

That's what I was thinking, too.

I was happy with my first purchase from Monoprice (toslink cable), so hopefully their component cables will be good value as well.

I finally got around to doing an A/B comparison with the cables last night (lazy me!).

Colors were the same, and picture quality was similar with one noticeable exception:
The audio cables introduced motion artifacts during fast-action sequences that were not present with the true component cables.

Moral of the story is that quality audio cables will work in a pinch, but don't expect perfect image quality.

BTW, the Monoprice cables that I bought link are excellent for the price. Only minor complaint is that the connectors are tighter than I prefer, but hey, they're not coming off any time soon. :)