S-Video

[Tommy volts]

I disconnected my 3 RCA connector composite video cable between my Sony DVD player and Sony TV and connected up an S-Video cable connection. The TV video is fine but there is no audio. I reconnected just the 2 RCA audio cables and now I get both video and audio.<p>But shouldn't the the S-Video cable carry the audio signal? Is the cable defective?

[haklesup]

S-Video is Video only. It is not an A/V cable. On a high end system, you might also have the choice of Digital optical Audio or Digital Coax Audio in addition to the RCA inputs.

[josmith]

Yes folks s-video just another dumb ass ripoff. In my case i was the dumb ass that paid an extra 40 bucks for the tv with an s-vid input plus the cost of the special cable just to find out that i could have hooked it up with regular audio and video cables. <p>Don't let this happin to u

[analogee]

Well, that's a somewhat overly pessimistic viewpoint...<p>S-Video carries the signal on two separate channels, Y and C. Y is luminance and C is chrominance. Normally, in a composite signal (usually the yellow RCA connector) these are combined together (as would be required for broadcasting over the air), and the TV has to separate them, which is difficult, and actually impossible to do perfectly without some artifacts. Some of the color gets into the black and white info, and vice versa. Composite signals cause the TV to show crawling dot patterns, and weird colors when someone wears clothes with black and white stripes, and things like that. So S-Video should look signifcantly better than composite.<p>I agree, though, $40 extra is kind of rude when all it is doing is bypassing some decode circuitry. But you probably had to move up to a significantly fancier model to get the S-Video input.<p>Regards,
Todd