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Banana plugs for receiver bindposts. Do any of you use them? Worth the bother?
I've always just screwed the wires directly into the receiver and speaker bindposts directly, but am considering trying these as I'm buying some replacement speaker cable.
Receiver manufacturers specifically mention not to use them as that way you can easily plug them in the wrong way and cause malfunction or damage. I use them.
I can't see how as they are colour coded. Far easier to directly wire cables in wrong.
Any specific make recommendations? And right angle ones for plugging into wall mounted speakers?
True, they are color coded, but with the ease of plugging them in and out, you can easily connect them wrongly whereas wiring them you pay more attention.
I don’t know which brand I use but are they not all the same? Nothing really special.
They seem to vary a lot in price. A pack of 6 range from £20 to over £100. But couldn't see much difference in them.
I usually pick the middle option, I don’t buy the cheapest ones but also don’t want to pay outrageous prices for something like that. So far it’s been a good decision. Are there no Amazon basic’s available?
Not sure. Will have a good look later.
I'm the same. Don't like to buy the cheapest because something is normally cheap for a reason. But don't like to pay silly money.
Bought some Monster optical cables for PS2 at the time, ridiculous, but I also had some Oehlbach 5 stars, but that's just overkill.
When I got the PS4, I noticed on the beamer that it would not display 4K 60fps, so I bought a 4K HDMI cable, can't remember the brand, but again in the middle tier, and they mentioned bla bla bla (talking about 15m cable). Most of the video settings were fine, but 4K 60fps showed not possible on the PS4. So I took my PS4 to my trusted HiFi guy, I think I already mentioned him here several times, and we tested it in his showroom with the same beamer and my cable, same result. He changed the cable, and everything was absolutely perfect. I don't know the brand but the 12m cable was around 200€. So he gave it to me, as it was working, and he just asked me 1/3 of the price, as it was already "used".
I'm twisted wire onto the binding posts. - Banana plugs on Amp are smaller than Speakers.
I use Chord C-Type HDMI
With analogue signals I used to by buy expensive scart and S Video cables. I forget the name but the Scart cables were gold plated with really thick green cables and were really heavy. When you picked up one of the generic black cables they used to bundle with VCRs the comparison was silly. They were complete rubbish.
And you could really see the difference in image quality, especially in full RGB mode. And SVideo, which I tended to use mostly for video editing made a big difference with SVHS.
But moving on to digital signals, the actual make and price of cable makes no difference to the quality. If an HDMI cable works it will send and receive an identical signal to any other cable, regardless of price. The issue is finding cables that work in certain situations. The main thing with them not working is cable version and length. A lot of older versions hate longer lengths or don't support 4k or eARC. 2.0 or older basically, but some that spec 2.1 are not always completely compliant. Shielding can be an issue too.
I needed a 10m HDMI cable once to connect from where I had my consoles to the display. The fairly expensive cable I bought worked but the PS3 at the time would only work properly in 1080i and not 1080p. Image would flicker to black occassionally. Guessing that was cable bandwidth.
They really need to work on developing a fast enough wireless interconnect protocol, like Bluetooth but much faster, so we can ditch all cables other than the power. Although if they followed the all in one cable idea with power and signal combined that would make a big difference too.
I connect my HiFi speakers up with Banana plugs. The amplifier ends have DIN plugs on though.
I use the generic ones from Rapid/RS/CPC/whoever; the same ones I use for multimeters, bench power supplies, etc.
I'd suggest getting the ones with screw terminals though rather than solderable ones. If you wish to solder them, you will need a rather powerful soldering iron as a 4mm banana plug is quite a big lump of metal and will suck the heat right out of the iron.
Display Port has a higher bandwidth. - We got this after HDMI on PC's....
And don't forget Thunderbolt from the Mac's..... We got that on PC's too....
Maybe Thunderbolt could become a universal standard eventually. :hmmm:
HDMI is pretty good for most situations. Newest version 2.1 supports 48Gbps bandwidth and 12bit colour. Displayport 1.4 is 32Gbps and 10 bit colour. And Thunderbolt is 40Gbps.
I do still use DP on PC because my GPU didn't have enough of one or type for 3 displays. So 2 are DVI and one is DP.
But the best solution for PCs is single port multimonitor daisy chaining support. That way you only need one cable going between each. At the moment that's only supported by dDsplayport and Thunderbolt, but there's no reason it couldn't work with HDMI. It of the 2 thunderbolt is the easier solution as you just string them together, but eh DP you need monitors with DP in and out ports.
I can't see any reason to use Thunderbolt unless you need multimonitor daisychainng support.
The other issue is Apple are the only one mainly using Thunderbolt. For that reason HDMI and USB C will remain the standard moving forward. There is thr ability to use USB C for video too, but that's limited to 10Gbps so 60hz 4k maximum.
I always though banana plugs would be a nice way to set things up, especially if you are moving house often (like I was as a student).
But I never, ever bothered to actually get any, and probably never will.
Same here. Always thought about it, but never got around to getting any. Just screwing down the wires. But I'm finalising my study finally and have added speaker wiring terminals in the walls so the wiring is running under the floor to wall sockets, and I'm therfore thinking of using them now. It's a bit overkill in a way, but I've always been annoyed at having so many cables running around rooms. So as I already had the floor up as I have rewired the whole room to add a lot more wall sockets and ethernet ports I thought I might as well add speaker wiring too.