Are gold-plated scarts worth it?

Little_John

Ive bought both cheap and expensive, the cheaper ones fall apart, the picture quality has been slightly ropey and they tend to be more suseptable to noise. I am currently ripping the Noel Gallager Sitting her in silence off channel 4 with what could be used as a tow rope for a car made by thor. I have used the cheap ones and again you get noise on the recording these are only a £40 set of stereo phone leads but they do the job. I used to use anything I could get my hands on but when I spent a few grand on a sound system I pushed the boat out and noticed the difference. I wont go back to the cheaper ones as I know that it could be better and I dont want to settle for 2nd best.

You need to think what is the weakest part of the system, the source is your dvd player £550 like mine or £20 from Asda, the output again a decent panasonic plasma or 21" technosonic from woolies? you cant polish a turd no matter how much you try you need to get a reasonable cable for it to ge a reasonable output.

is a gold connector worth it?
If you have a decent kit spend the extra and get decent cables.
If the source and output are not then you cant make it much worse with crap interconnects.

trets77

I also have a Arcam DVD player and you simply don,t spend £800+ on a DVD player to hook it up with a free or cheap plastic lead. and yes you really can see a big differnce between cheap and expensive scarts. i also have a £40 mains lead and £50 mains adapter to reduce that noise down to nothing.

the basic rule is simple..... a high quality scart cannot improve a cheap dvd player but a cheap one can degrade a high quality player. i would not go over £10 for any sub £150 player.

That said if your spending £800 on a DVD player ANY scart is not doing it justice . i have component Thor RGB leads (£45) on mine. and it makes scart look second rate

now of course HDMI is the standard for high end owners.

banger9365

i have to go with gold connectors are better put you have to have the better hardwere to see/hear the differance and you can see/hear a differance between the different manufastores that make them , put most poeple will not see/hear a big diffence with main streem hardwere only at the highmid rang to high end stuff like rotel ,arcam ,denom ect

BarginHunter-1

In this day and age, and varied quality of equipment it has to be down to not only the picture quality you want but also the picture quality you can get..

Gold is a better conductor than other metals but only gold to gold connections otherwise its only as good as the poorest conductor.

The shielding on a cable is the most important thing to consider - without good shielding the best connections would be useless - good shielding can improve a poorer connection (i user the term poorer relatively) no end

zappahey

trets77 wrote:

I also have a Arcam DVD player and you simply don,t spend £800+ on a DVD player to hook it up with a free or cheap plastic lead. and yes you really can see a big differnce between cheap and expensive scarts. i also have a £40 mains lead and £50 mains adapter to reduce that noise down to nothing.

If I was spending that sort of money on a DVD player, I'd expect it to have adequate mains filtering out of the box.

fatnbald

It is total sales spiel to try and get you to part with your hard earned - if you really want to have the lowest resistance possible across the connections they should be silver plated as silver is a better conductor than gold, the gold plated ones are the hi-fi equivalent of gold plated taps and gold filling in your teeth, they work the same but are more flashy.
The specification and style of the cabling will be more of an issue to the quality.
Remember also the socket these things go into will not be anything other than standard so there is little point in one side of the connection being so called superior quality. The super expensive ones are for bragging rights only.

VincentVega

Woby_Tide wrote:

so after spending £800 on a DVD player you still have the same issues about whether to spend £1 or £50 on a scart that you would if you had a £15 DVD player......hmmmmmmmm

Actually, the cable was free. And, in response to someone else, being nearly two years old, the player does not have HDMI so that is not an option. The component sockets on my TV (why Sony chose to put only one set on is beyond me) are currently used by my Nintendo Wii.

trets77

If I was spending that sort of money on a DVD player, I'd expect it to have adequate mains filtering out of the box.

adequate yes mains filtering no .

but do you think a Arcam owner is happy with adequate ??? leads they supply with even high end products are designed simply to make the product operational. Half the fun is adding your own high end cables ect. a system is only as good as it weakest part.

thetargetarcher

Well I bought the Pro Scart Lead from here:

http://www.cutpricecables.co.uk/index.html

Description on the above website is:

PRO SCART Lead - A professional quality SCART plug to plug lead made from fully shielded heavy duty oxygen free copper (OFC) cable and with gold plated terminals for low noise and enhanced signal quality. All 21 pins connected, ensuring full compatibility with all kinds of audio/video equipment. Suitable for connecting to SCART sockets on a wide range of audio/video equipment including televisions, DVD players, video recorders, satellite decoders, digiboxes, surround sound amplifiers etc. This lead is 2m long.


It is £6.99 with free P&P

It seems to offer the same quality as the Cambridge Premium Scart interconnect I purchased from Richer Sounds for about £20 a few years ago. However the thickness of the cable is a bit less.

My personal opinion is that there is a huge mark up on interconnect cables. Particulary for some brand names. Yes it is true that cheap cables such as those sold in supermarkets can be poor quality when compared to others. Basically you need to know if the cable is OFC and well shielded. Oh and make sure that all 21 pins are used so you can use it with a RGB Scart socket in order to make use of RGB- alot better than composite.

Cut price cables delivered my purchase promptly and it was well packaged. I forget but I may have also ordered phono leads from them too.

They use WorldPay for payments.