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A/V Rack Cleanup

Recently my wife and son went out of town for a week to visit family leaving me plenty of time to engage in ‘Low Value Housework’, such as rewiring my Media Rack in the garage so that its easier to work on, looks better and actually -works- better.

Here are some pics of the final product (read on for pics and more)

Here we see a closeup of my telco box. The telephone comes in from the left, the ethernet comes in through the bottom left, the gigabit switch comes in from the top and the IR comes in through the bottom center.

The telco punches down into the distribution block on the left. This will allow me to run multiple lines into the house if I ever need to. Each room receives 6 wires of IR and 2 wires of telco (8 wires == 1 Cat5 cable) so I bridge the 2 telco wires over to the center punchdown so that they then trickle back out to each room on the green Cat5.

On the right is my IR distribution amp. From the center punchdown 3 wires (IR send) come out on the far right and bridge over to the input on the amp. The output of the amp comes back over to the center punchdown on 3 other wires.

Each room has a green Cat5 that connects to the center block and thus gets 6 wires of IR (send/recieve) and 2 wires of phone (1 phone line). Its pretty elegant and works incredibly well.

Here is a farther out view of my rack. On the right you can see the autopatch and my media pc wall racked to save space. A lot of cables are still not stowed to my satisfaction but they will eventually get to where I need them to be.

I had 3 primary goals.

1) Clean up the darn mess
2) Convert from Composite video/analog audio to Component video and Digital Audio
3) Relocate my components into the rack to increase overall space.

It ended up pretty nice I think. I still have a ways to go with some loose wires and need to rewire my power so that I don’t need all those surge suppressors plugged into a 20Amp circuit but its nice for now.

Interesting though was that I got to keep my analog audio channels (Cat5e) and run the digi audio next to it (RG-6). This lets me push analog audio (via a rack mounted DAC) to non-digital audio devices and digital audio to devices that can handle it locally. Its a great deal of flexibility and I’m really happy with it.

So for example, the output to my office outputs Component video and two channels of analog audio since I do not have a tuner. The analog audio originates in the garage from a small DAC that accepts the digital audio signal from my switcher.

Now, at the same time my family room does accept digital audio into a local DAC that then splits analog line level to my TV and my Tuner. Eventually I will eliminate the DAC, go straight to the tuner and then connect the tuner pre-amp output to my TV.

One annoying thing I did have to do was buy a line-doubler for my Tivo. I have an older DirecTivo that only outputs Composite or SVideo. The line doubler takes that 480i signal, upconverts it to 480p and outputs it as component video for input into the autopatch. Thats the way it is until the series 3 Tivo comes out and we can all finally upgrade.. My Media PC outputs HD natively (component) as does my DVD player (progressive scan) so I only needed one of these magic boxes. You can see it in the rack picture sitting on top of the tivo.

Overall, same great switching capability with sidebyside analog and digital audio and its working well. Except for the fact that all my standalone DAC’s are built for CD Players and thus can not accept a 5.1 signal but thats an issue for another day..

Oh! I also installed some great custom cables from Blue Jeans Cables. They are 5 foot long bundled cables that carry RGB and Digital Audio in color coded cables and end caps. The terminating ends are BNC for the autopatch and the other ends are RCA for the rack. Great quality, great build and it keeps things clean. Expensive but well-priced at $60/cable or so. I highly recommend them and they will build most anything for reasonable pricing. For example, the cable I got was originally RGBV (cable strain relief color: Red, Green, Blue and White I think) but they built, for the same price, Red, Green Blue and Orange for me so that it makes sense for my config. Everything they do is build to order so its pretty flexible and they are a solid company.