I’m going to be adding more updates as they come re. availability of coax, and changes to any cabling.
Please note that we will not degrade the quality of any cabling. If cabling changes, it will be improved if possible. The improvement to the new coax is, in my opinion, the fact we managed to get cabling for one way rather than two way SCART. We had other options for two way SCART all along but the majority of it is too thick for our purposes. What we were using - the blue coax was the maximum thickness we felt was reasonable. The one way coax will be slightly thinner overall but the individual coaxes inside it will be thicker. It’s rated for longer distances so we should be able to add more length options.
Here’s how you make your coax slightly thicker while still managing to get the overall cable to be thinner:
There’s always some redundant lines in SCART standard cabling so that “21 pins” can be connected, which is nothing more than a marketing gimmick - 3 of the lines in SCART were never used in any equipment and there’s no reason to have enough wires to connect an additional 3 extra lines for audio and video *output* in a SCART cable designed only for input. Still, if you are purchasing cable that’s designed for SCART, these lines are always present in the cable by default and the only way to jettison these and keep the cable at a lower profile is to get the cable custom made.
So by sending cable designs to cable production companies, we were able to jettison the three redundant lines that are not used by anything as well as the extra output lines.
It is possible for cheaper and shorter cable to use cheaper shielding. That’s why we’re changing the regular cable too at some point in the summer for a partial shielded version that isolates audio and should be fine for shorter cable runs. If you’re setting up a room though, with multiple consoles running through switchboxes, going up to ten feet into a switchbox, then through another cable going out of it, and especially if you’re using a BNC setup, running isolated wires into an extron switchbox, coax is the way to go.