Digital Coaxial Cable: just a component video line?

Question

At Best Buy I was recently looking at their cabling when I noticed something. On the back of one of their subwoofers, instead of using a "Digital Coaxial" cable they were using the green plug on a component video cord to hook their BD player to their AV Receiver. A guy there told me they were the same thing actually.

I always thought it was funny that they used the same connectors. I knew component was different from composite video (one video transfer lane compared to three, the reason for three plugs), but is a digital coax cable really the same as a component video cable?

Answer 1

never heard that. hook it up and find out. it won't fry anything. it will either work or it won't. both send little to no voltage.

Answer 2

these all have RCA plugs (component, composite, digital coaxial cable). You can use your component cables in place of composite/coaxial cables.

The reason for the colors is to avoid confusion.

The best thing to do is to tape and label both ends so when you are hooking up devices you just look at the labels and won't get confused over the colors.

Answer 3

you are very confusing, first digital coaxial is use for digital audio instead of optical.

a subwoofer use RCA analog cable. maybe the confusion came from the name of the cable and the name of the connection/port in this terms a component cable use 3 rca analog cable so to see it this way its like 3 subwoofer cable together and with painted tips red, green and blue.

so in terms of cables rca analog, component cables, composite, digital audio coaxial, ect.. are the same they all use an RCA connector but they differ in length, gauge and obviously the connections are different component connection is not the same as composite connection !!

Answer 4

They are the same thing.

A 'composite' cable is a RCA cable made with 75 ohm coax.  

A 'component' cable is simply 3 composite cables in a bundle.

When they created the Sony Phillips Digital Interface format (SPDIF), they specified a Composite video cable for the digital-coaxial connection. (They wanted a very common cable)

AUDIO:

Audio cables can be made with 50, 75, 110, 300 ohm coax.  It does not matter for the lower-frequency audio signals.

Answer 5

The subwoofer output from most receivers is just plain analog audio... not digital. Any cable suitable for analog audio will work fine between a receiver and sub.

A digital coaxial cable is the same thing as an analog audio cable. But, they are designed with a 75 ohm impedance to work best for digital audio. They'll work fine for analog (1 high-end cable manufacturer uses 75 ohm wire in their analog audio cables) and 75 ohm cables are used for composite video too.

Component video cables are just 75 ohm cables that carry an analog video signal split into three parts. They should work fine for analog or digital audio as well. They probably aren't as thick as higher-end audio cables and may sound a little "thin" for analog audio. There might be hum issues caused by any non-used and non-grounded cables just hanging there and acting like antennas, picking up RF in some areas.

All of the cheaper "in the box" cables I've seen for digital audio, analog audio, component video, etc... are all made out of the same cheap wire and plugs. Just the colors of the plugs and number of cables grouped together changes. So... the Best Buy guy was probably right that they're the same thing as far as the cheaper cables go ... You should have no problem interchanging their functions in a pinch. No harm will come from it. But, if you have a nicer system, you'd probably want to use quality cables designed for the function you're using them for.

Answer 6

A subwoofer cable is coaxial in design. HOWEVER while a video cable will have enough bandwidth to provide the correct 75 Ω impedance, its bandwidth is to big and will allow for noise to be coupled.

Furthermore as a former BB manager I would not trust anything they say, either do to incompetence or out and out misinformation.

So to answer you question it wil work but not as well as the proper cable.

Will you hear a difference? Depends on your equipment. Most of the systems in best buy are too low end to really show a marked difference in performance. Although it is there is it really worth the extra amount? Couple that with the fact that BB and CC both will accept manufacture first run rejects and reman units and sell them as new!

Case in point why you should stay away from BB in the first place.