Terry, Agree with you on those S-Video plugs - very time consuming.

jkreidler, Since we're on the subject, is CAT5E shielded ?
or do you have to specify a shielded version of CAT5E ? - just curious.

Thanks.

The particluar product they have

Souns exactly the same as what I suggested on 1/8/03

"I've gone 50-75 ft on occation with standard Cat-5e and Leviton quickport plates (Cat-5 punches down onto back and provides a female s-video jack for a wall plate) this works OK, but I've gotten noise in random weird situations."

Anyway....

How do you "Guarantee" the 125'? What does this company really do if you call them and tell them you have noise and its only a 50' run? What if you have a house full of 125' Cat-5e runs and none of them work right when you go to hook up your matrix switcher to the clients TVs? This sounds like a really strange claim. Especially in area of the country that do not require conduit for their electricity.

As to the person that asked about sheilding.

The Twists in the wire help create a natrually occuring "sheild" in a cat-5/5e/6 wire.

cmo sez: "jkreidler, Since we're on the subject, is CAT5E shielded ?"

That is a GREAT question, and it goes to the heart of what CAT5E is and what it does.

It is not shielded. It is highly immune to noise picked up along its length, though.

Want to know why?

If you took lamp cord, where the two wires are parallel, and used it as a signal wire running near a source of interference, such as an electrical cord, voltages would be induced into both conductors of the lamp cord. The voltages would both have the same polarity, so they would cancel each other, right? Not exactly. If one of the conductors is closer to the source of interference along its path, the voltage induced in it will be stronger than the voltage induced in the other conductor, so there will be a net voltage at the end of the run.

How do you minimize this? Twist the wire. Phone wires have been twisted since the late 1800s to elminate "crosstalk," where the talk from one pair crosses over to another pair of phone wires. That way, the distance of each conductor from the interference will average out to be the same, and no net voltage will be at the end.

You get better cancellation of interference if you have more twists to the foot, and more twists to the foot also gives you cancellation at higher frequencies. Thus the higher category wires basically have more twists. Higher category terminations require shorter untwisted leads (at the connectors) to maintain the noise cancellation.

These voltages that are coming in, cancelled by being the same on each wire, are called "common mode" voltages because the voltage is common, or the same, on each wire. You may have no net voltage between the two wires, but your receiving device must have a good CMRR, or common mode rejection ratio.

The only other thing to consider is the problem you can have with shielded wires, which is a voltage difference between the grounds in the equipment at the two ends of the wires. I have a 200' audio run that I have to fix because although it reproduces the entire audio spectrum, there is a healthy dose of 60 Hz because of ground potential difference.

Understood and noted.

Thanks