Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Tip for installing and using in-wall HDMI cables

Most of the in-wall HDMI runs for my home theater, office etc are 25 to 60 feet in length. I made sure to use large gauge HDMI cables to prevent signal loss.

I have been using my home theater for over a year now, and noticed that my projector would go black for split seconds at a time, although the audio would not cut out. I assumed it was some incompatibility between the various components in the system (Blu ray player, Projector, Receiver, DirecTV box etc). By the way, I did have other problems with the signal until I turned off the Pioneer Receiver's AV post processing.

I kept putting off investigation of this problem. Recently however, I realized what the problem was. I was using lower quality HDMI cables to connect the wall terminal to the component. So I had 50 feet of high quality cable, and 3 feet of low quality cable at one end of the run to connect between the wall and the home theater equipment. This was causing a signal bottleneck.

Once I replaced the HDMI "patch" cables with better quality ones, my signal blackouts went away.