Essential Install | OneAV Brand Spotlight
PXLDRIVE is
designed to provide
a one shot fi ts all
solution for full fat
4K delivery
Pixel Power!
Available from OneAV, Jack MacDougall, president of Pixelgen,
explains the power of his brand to deliver 4K AV performance.
How did we get to the point where HDMI connections
everywhere, once proudly carrying glorious 1080p
signals, start to fail with the insurgence of 4K? Perhaps a
more topical question: why did the recently installed 4K
interconnect solutions start failing when the latest HDMI
2.0b enabled equipment was connected around them?
The same symptoms are always there – sparkles,
mysterious/random video drop outs and the dreaded
‘No Image Found’ error. To avoid all explanation, ideally,
the hardware manufacturers, could engineer effi cient
and reliable future-proofed HDMI connectivity products.
Permanent HDMI extension technology to help in
long haul HDMI applications – sadly, standards evolve
and connectivity solutions become obsolete, unable
to support the latest and greatest. It’s frustrating, but
everything is going to be OK.
In the beginning, the only answer to achieving robust
HDMI long reach signal recovery (above 5m) was to make
the cable itself as thick as possible to accommodate the
eight large 22AWG (or 24AWG) high-speed wires, as
thicker ones result in less attenuation for higher bandwidth
signals. Of course, there are several other wires for handling
low-speed communication (DDC, CEC, ARC) and DC (+5V,
HPD) signals as well. Once all wires were shoved into one
jacket, this caused an industry-wide stigma towards HDMI
cables and basketball sized bend radiuses to/from HDMI
equipment breaking HDMI ports. That and a tidal wave of
random budget HDMI boosters were relied upon (either
in-cable or detachable form). The simple and progressive
strategy was to repurpose category cabling (CAT5e, CAT6
etc.) to adequately fi ll this void, not only to remove the
negativ