Yesterday, my long awaited Samsung 46″ LCD HDTV arrived and I had a ball of a time hooking it up with the rest of my electronics. The TV is a 5 series which has been very widely regarded in the Samsung TV owner community, and the one I bought sports a 30:000 contrast and 3 HDMI inputs among its standout qualities, all in 1080p. When I bought it, it was $1591, but right now it’s $1499 with free shipping and no tax to most states. If you’ve been shopping around, I strongly recommend this unit at this price!!! I have been monitoring the price like a hawk since I bought it for price adjustment and I’ve seen it fluctuate wildly from the price I bought it at up to $1630. Just a reminder though, make sure you are buying from Amazon (not Electronics Expo or some other retailer) to get the free shipping and price adjustment guarantee.

Back on topic, I originally had an awful ghetto setup consisting of two very old Sharp speakers, an old tape deck, a car subwoofer and amp, a simple Realistic audio switch (literally a switch), and PC power supply (don’t ask). Anyhow, I’m saving a bit of space by replacing the sound system with my PC speakers, the Logitech Z-5500 THX certified ones without spending more money to buy a new receiver (I guess it’s that ghetto cheap streak in me). Anyhow, the Z-5500 unit has a coax digital audio input. I had always suspected that the input looked suspiciously like a regular RCA audio input so I gave it a try. I connected my DVD player’s digital coax output to the Logitech’s receiver and what do you know, it worked! Plain old regular analog RCA cables can be used in place of more expensive coax digital cables. This isn’t true for some cases certainly because the digital coax cables have a 70 ohm impedance requirement, but most RCA cables manufactured today adhere to that anyways though it’s not necessary. For a cable to be qualified as “coax digital” it must meet certain more stringent requirements than a regular RCA cable including the impedance requirement and additional shielding. With my foot long wire, I doubt there will be much signal loss or interference. Plus these cables were manufactured in the 90s I think. So if you must absolutely have the best quality sound, then you might want to buy a coax digital cable. Otherwise if you’re like me, a cheap guy who can’t tell the difference between good and bad sound, then try out our existing RCA cables in your home system. At best it’ll save you some money and you’ll turn one cable into two (your red and white RCA cables are substituted by a single digital coax cable, in your case it would be either the white or red one). Reduce clutter and get more cables? How awesome is that? At worst, you’ll lose nothing. So give it a try.

If you were also wondering like me whether to invest in the more expensive digital optical cable over a regular coax cable, unless you need a really long connection over 10 feet, you won’t hear any difference. The verdict is: save yourself some money and buy coax digital cables over optical cables.

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