This guy is literally trying to get information to design a product that could help us. In return we’re bashing his grammar and giving him way more information than he needs...to feel more intelligent than him?? No wonder we end up with crap that halfway works.

Chris,
I don't quite agree with you.
If you're a beginner and you want to design, say, a power system for a home, you don't buy "electrical for dummies." You get more information than you need, and you study it and learn what you can. Then you choose what of that information you'll use. (I have, however, seen a couple of guys trying to finish wiring a store with "Electrical Wiring for Dummies" open on a chair.) (That title is not available... maybe someone got killed!)

If a person hears about and learns only exactly what he needs to know to do a task, he won't be able to THINK when something unusual comes up.

When I asked him to become familiar with the terms we use, that was not criticizing his grammar, it was a plea for him to join the discussion better by literally speaking our language. If he's the only one working on projects like his who uses terms we don't use, he won't be able to communicate very well with us.

That IS what you meant by correcting his grammar, right?

You guys are right but when i tell dealers extender they look at me funny not always understanding. When i say Balun i get the aha moment.

Trust me our engineers hate it when I refer to it as anything else but an extender.

All kidding aside, thanks for all the feedback

Please ask the engineer to post here.

No disrespect, but why has a salesperson been tasked with a design issue?

At a manufacture, it is the job of the sales people to interact and get feedback. You seriously think they want engineers talking to their client/customers!

I've had factory engineers interact with me. In one case the local rep brought a factory engineer along and we spent most of the day discussing things.

Here's a test: do you say bal-un, where bal rhymes with pal and un is, well, un? Some people call them bay-luns, and everybody else on this site is sick of me talking about this, but a balun converts BALanced signals to UNbalanced signals, so they are not bay-luns.


But that's a good thing. There are adaptors for NTSC video signals, which have a BNC connector on one end and two screw terminals on the other end; the BNC hot goes directly to one screw and the ground goes to the other. These are often called baluns, though they don't convert from balanced to unbalanced. They are adaptors. "Balun" has come to mean what video meant in the 80s, when I had a video switcher that had only F connectors on it. You know, switching the video that comes in from the TV antenna....

Kidding is a good sign. Did I say welcome to the site? Welcome to the site!

Hello Friends,

KP from Inneos, here. I'm an engineer from qz's company.

Firstly, I want to share the not-so-subtle joy I experience with y'all calling him out for saying "balun" - I cringe literally every time I hear that word used in our industry. Unfortunately, that term is more or less ubiquitous for extension tech in this industry, as that was one of the more prevalent uses for it back in the single-line analog days, so that's the heuristic description that sales ends up using. I at least have him saying "It's *basically* a fiber balun" these days. While i'm absolutely with you in regards to pronunciation, lets not forget that SCUBA is pronounced skOObuh, not SkuhBah for "Underwater" and "Apparatus" respectively... The joys of English!

On to business-
All of his questions were worded correctly - the basic inquiries are:

At the integrator level, are you even aware of the signal voltages?
Background: There is ZERO standardization in the industry for this. Every different company uses every permutation of 3.5mm TRS for Power, Signal, Ground with 5V, 9V, and 12V architectures. Xantech is different than Snap is different than Vanco is different than AVPro is different than <insert company here> which inevitably leads to various lines being shorted out with you look at the various manufacturer pinouts that conveniently put a 12V on one part that mates up to a ground of another manufacturer.

Regarding Ernie's statement of using the systems that are available: Our product is meant for use *within* a system's components. If you purchase an IR hub which comes with a X detectors and Y emitters, our design vision was to be places us between the detector (at the TV) and the hub (back at the rack) and therefore passing that signal back.

Is it important for the IR lines to be terminated with 3.5mm?
Mac and Roddy seem to be very comfortable with phoenix and bare wire applications, which is encouraging.

The question really boils down to this:

What IR systems (detector, hub, emitter) do you use, and why?

One of the issues is that the "balun" we all know and love is really a "balun extender" meaning we take advantage of balanced to unbalanced so that we can extend a signal. If everyone called them "balun extender" i think "HDMI extender" would have been the obvious choice and no one would be saying "HDMI BALUN".


This is what we use.

URC
RTI
Crestron
Harmony

I haven't used a xantech/niles/whatever IR extender in 15 years.

I emphasized the need to use ONE PRODUCT BRAND for all IR equipment specifically because there are different voltages and pinouts from brand to brand.

I suppose, seeing Mac's list of what we use, I'd have to ask kp and qz just what you intend to do in an existing closed system. If it was obvious before, I've lost sight of it.

Funny, actually funny, that you have a problem with the word balun, and you want to say "HDMI extender." HDMI, first and foremost, uses the HDMI connector, so once you're changing from the wire and connector of an HDMI cable, you're converting or adapting to another kind of wiring. That is, it's no longer HDMI, though it may end up having all the attributes of an HDMI signal at the other end, and the other side of the converter at the other end.

That said, everybody calls them HDMI extenders, so this is just so much "get-off-my-lawn" persnicketude.


By the way, 10,012 points for using "heuristic."