Making the best connections for HDTV

Whether you’ve spent thousands on a super-duper ultra-thin widescreen HDTV and Dolby surround sound home entertainment receiver, or only a few hundred bucks on an ordinary tube TV, making the right connections is key to enjoying the sharpest picture and clearest sound possible.

But in an unofficial inspection of my family and friends’ TVs and entertainment gear, nearly all were using the most obvious — and low quality — connection available: Those standard (and crappy) coax cables provided with their cable TV boxes and DVD or VHS players and recorders. Few realized those other ports around back of their TVs and players could offer a better quality picture and, for those with audio receivers, better sound, too.

And therein lies the problem: Coax cable. Sure, on older TVs and VCRs it was the only game in town. That round, threaded nub sticking out of the back of your TV, cable box, and video cassette recorder, all of them connected together with those thick, unwieldy cables that are hard to screw on and off when you’re changing gear or moving things to another room.

But for the last several years, most TVs and home entertainment gear (except for the cheapest of cheap) include at least a second, better video and sound connection ports, and many include several, each rising higher in the quality as you go up the ladder.

At the bottom rung is coax, as previously described. It carries both the video and audio signal, though optionally some of my friends knew to at least use the red and white left/right stereo outputs from their VCRs or cable boxes to those whose TVs had built-in stereo speakers, which makes movies sound a little better than if using only coax.

The next step up is composite video, which is that yellow “RCA” type jack around the backside of TVs and gear. Using this jack to connect your TV and VCR together, for instance, provides noticeably sharper results.

Composite is followed by S-Video, whose port is a round circle with a bunch of little pin holes, into which you plug an S-Video cable. This connection is available on DVD players and video game consoles alike, and is even sharper than composite, though the next rung up the ladder has increasingly become the best good connection around: Component video. To see if your TV or DVD player has it, look for a trio of ports that are red, blue and green in color, placed closely together. Component video is sometimes labeled RGB, HDTV or, more technically (and cryptically) labeled as YPbPr or YCbCr.

The bottom line is component video is the minimum standard connection required to display the hi-def signal from your HDTV cable or satellite box on your HDTV widescreen TV. Many non-HDTV sets and DVD players, video game consoles, and other gear have RGB component video inputs and outputs on them, and if your stuff has these ports available and you’re not currently using them, you’re definitely missing out on higher-quality visuals.

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