Are our lives too complex????

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Well,

Mary wired lots of those CAT5 runs back to the patch panel last night,
so we now have working cabling to the bedroom and my study. Mary's
study, the nursery, and the main sitting room to follow...


However, I was thinking about the number of differnt
devices/cables/ports required to play back music in my current
lifestyle. Take, for instance, the very well recorded Innuendo album,
which appears to have been recorded in some form of surround. Let's look
at how the REAR channel enables Brian May to play behind my right ear:


The music starts as an MP3 file on the hard disk of my PC (in the study)
(device 1)
Goes out onto a CAT5 patch cable (in the study) (cable 1)
Into a hub (in the study) (device 2)
Onto a CAT5 patch cable (in the study) (cable 2)
Into a wall point (in the study) (port 1)
To the patch panel port 9 (in the dressing room) (port 2)
Onto a CAT5 patch cable (in the dressing room) (cable 3)
Looped to patch panel port 4 (in the dressing room) (port 3)
To a wall point (in the bedroom) (port 4)
Onto a CAT5 patch cable (in the bedroom) (cable 4)
Into the DDAR (in the bedroom) (device 3)
Which converts it into an analogue signal on a pair of phono cables (in
the bedroom) (cable 5)
Into the A/V switch (in the bedroom) (device 4)
Which converts it into a PCM stream and puts it out on a digital coax
cable (in the bedroom) (cable 6)
Into the processor (in the bedroom) (device 5)
Which takes the rear channels onto a pair of phono cables (in the
bedroom) (cable 7)
Through a phono/SCART convertor (in the bedroom) (device 6)
Into a KAT5 transmitter (in the bedroom) (device 7)
Into a CAT5 patch cable (in the bedroom) (cable 8)
Into a wall port (in the bedroom) (port 5)
To the patch panel port 1 (in the dressing room) (port 6)
Onto a CAT5 patch cable (in the dressing room) (cable 9)
Looped to patch panel port 5 (in the dressing room) (port 7)
To a wall point (at the other end of the bedroom) (port 8)
Into a CAT5 patch cable (in the bedroom) (cable 10)
Into a KAT5 receiver (in the bedroom) (device 8)
Through a phono/SCART convertor (in the bedroom) (device 9)
Onto a pair of phono cables (in the bedroom) (cable 11)
Into an amplifier (in the bedroom) (device 10)
Onto a pair of speaker cables (in the bedroom) (cable 12)
Into a pair of loudspeakers (in the bedroom) (device 11)

11 devices (including two passive SCART<->Phono convertors, so 9
active
devices)
12 cables (counting pairs of phono or speaker cable as a single cable)
6 ports (4 on the patch panel,

Ho hum...

Mark Harrison
Head of Systems, eKingfisher