General Help & Knowledge Request

Suave

Distinguished Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2004
Messages
5,150
Reaction score
824
Points
1,188
Age
60
Hi All,

I am i the process of setting up home cinema wiring on a wall which will then be completely hidden by wall to wall and floor to ceiling cabinets so, once they are in place, I will have very little option to change things!

I have run adequate conduit in the walls for the speaker wires, have allowed for 2 hdmi cables that will be connected to the opposite wall under the floor boards via a wall plate (so I can connect to my Macbook Pro), have allowed for plenty of ac sockets, al the various satellite, cable tv & normal tv cables and a telephone extension socket and may also allow cabling for a FM/DAB radio.

On other forums, I see many people talking about setting up wiring for networking (which I know nothing about) and many insist on running various cables called:

1) Cat 5 or Cat 5E
2) Cat 6 or Cat 6E
3) Ethernet Cable
4) LAN Cable
5) NAS (Network Attached Storage)

I know this sounds really thick, but what are these cables & how could I use them? I wish to be as future proofed as possible and would love to things as wirelessly as possible or have suitable connections already in place so I do not end up having a trail of wires across the room. I plan on integrating a media centre computer (mac or pc) later and wish to download HD stuff from computer/sky/satellite on to a hard drive. I have not bought a HDTV yet but wish it to be able to connect up to the internet. I have tried learning about the above cables but as soon as things get a little techy, I get a little lost!

Regards,

Suave!
 
Hello Sauve

Relatively low cost Twisted Pair 'Ethernet' cables are used in the Computer environment for transferring large amounts of data around.

CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6 are all variations on a theme; as the numbers go up the Spec of the cable allows for higher Data rates but also calls for better cable handling when being installed.

Most Consumer systems will utilise CAT5 or CAT5e as its easer to work with.

A LAN (Local Area Network) is a group of PC devices - usually connected together using twisted pair Ethernet cables.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive is a stand alone Hard drive that can serve data to devices such as a Video or Audio streamer without requiring a host PC to be switched on.

Joe
 

The latest video from AVForums

TV Buying Guide - Which TV Is Best For You?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom