Quick Review of Lotharek HQ Video Cable

[ACML]

20 hours ago, Fierodoug5 said:

Got my cable from Herculesworkshop.com. I got the double shielded cable, I went with the 3.5mm audio jack version since that worked best for me, but he has a RCA version as well.

http://herculesworkshop.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-product.cgi?d=hercules-workshop&item=80304

It is a very high quality looking and feeling cable, the wire size is much thicker than the 8bitclassics cable I was using.

The first Screenshot is my before pic, very bad jailbars. Stock 800xl, Dell FP-2001 monitor hooked up S-video

The second screenshot is with the Hercules cable, no other changes. The difference is amazing! No jailbars, crystal clear!

I can HIGHLY recommend Hercules Workshop cables.

 

Does the 3.5mm jack have both Left and right audio?  I know the Atari is only mono, but do you have to buy a stereo male 3.5mm to dual RCA?

 

[Fierodoug5]

I just plugged it into my pc speakers and it sounds fine

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, ACML said:

Does the 3.5mm jack have both Left and right audio?  I know the Atari is only mono, but do you have to buy a stereo male 3.5mm to dual RCA?

 

There's a diagram right at the lower part of the page for the item that shows exactly what connections are used by each connector on the cable -- for both the RCA and 3.5 mm audio jack options.

 

 

 

Edited September 11, 2020 by MrFish

[tsom]

On 9/11/2020 at 10:25 AM, tsom said:

Well, I now have one on order. Will report back as to how it looks on my 130xe (where I have the vertical bars).

Awww. Just noticed my order confirmation says it’s out of stock and I’ll be notified when it ships. So stay tuned

[lotharek]

On 8/23/2020 at 7:43 PM, flashjazzcat said:

Does it make the XBox 360 have jailbars?

 

 

so, let me add sth... those are indeed xbox 360 cables i have bought approx 250 kgs in a bunch ( yes, 30x10 kg parcels i have received with packing)

 

i use them with scart adapter where all 4 plugs are connected. i suggest connect svideo and audio cables to receiver to eliminate problems.

 

what i think: if they were sutiable for next gen consoles, they must be OK for 30old year hardware. and shielding has actually nothing to do here..only can introduce some noice from power supplies.

 

MYTEK - simple test - set svideo as source and check picture.. then connect audio 2 audio rca`s. picture will improve significantly. 

 

and it is true, that some monitors will display better picture than others, but...as assumed by FJC - xbox do not make jailbars, so why blame cable when atari does ?

[+mytek]

3 hours ago, lotharek said:

...shielding has actually nothing to do here..only can introduce some noice from power supplies.

Not entirely true. Shielding the individual wires prevents signal cross talk between them, which is crucial to preventing the jail bars caused by chroma clocking being superimposed on top of the luminance signal. The jail bars that I and others have shown in photos, is the visual confirmation of the chroma clocking being mixed with the luminance when using an S-Video monitor.

 

I tested with 2 different LCD monitors, and also with the RetroTink 2X, all showing the jail bars with your HQ video cable. And proof in the pudding that individual shielding does indeed matter is, that when I built my own cable of the same length as yours, but instead used individually shielded wires for all the video signals - it renders a clean image on those same devices from the same video source .

 

Quote

MYTEK - simple test - set svideo as source and check picture.. then connect audio 2 audio rca`s. picture will improve significantly. 

That is how I always hook up my monitor, since I like to have sound with my picture .

 

Using your HQ video cable, it made no difference on my attempts either with or without the audio simultaneously connected.

 

[flashjazzcat]

4 hours ago, lotharek said:

as assumed by FJC - xbox do not make jailbars, so why blame cable when atari does ?

I was being mildly facetious there. I have no personal experience of these cables (nor any opinion on them one way or another), but empirical fact: shielding quality and grounding makes a difference to jailbars, even with VBXE and other RGB solutions. I would guess the XBox 360's s-video circuitry is somewhat more refined (and within spec) than that of the 8-bit Atari, so cable quality may be less of a concern there.

 

[ivop]

1 hour ago, flashjazzcat said:

I would guess the XBox 360's s-video circuitry is somewhat more refined (and within spec) than that of the 8-bit Atari, so cable quality may be less of a concern there.

I think it is exactly that. ANTIC generates a color signal that is basically a pulse width modulated square wave instead of a phase shifted sine wave. But after it goes through a couple of analog filters, especially in the television itself, old TVs/monitors see no difference. Modern LCDs don't have those analog filters. They "sample" as quickly as possible and do the rest in the digital domain. Crosstalk is more prominent there, because the square waves are not "rounded" like in an analog circuit. Even if you filter the color carrier out of the luma signal (which is what they do), with our Atari signal you are left with all the harmonics of a square wave that shouldn't be there.

Edited September 14, 2020 by ivop
typo :)

[+mytek]

Bottom line the fact is that the HQ video cable is not shielded either individually or as a whole (even though it's advertised as such). This is a poor practice to implement when fabricating any cable to be used with video signals which applies to: RF , composite, S-Video, RGB, or VGA.

 

I know we've heard from people on this topic that have stated that the HQ cable worked for them, but we've also heard from an equal number that said it didn't. And furthermore these same individuals experiencing problems with the HQ cable have bought or made a different cable adhering to proper technique that ended up curing the problem. The difference that was achieved by using an alternative video cable has been shown clear as night and day with the posted photos.

 

 

Fact: Closely evenly spaced vertical lines are usually the result of Chroma bleeding over into Luma.

 

So as a manufacturer and seller, I would think that instead of trying to force a bad video cable to work by suggesting that the audio cables be plugged in, it would be preferable to build the cable the way it should be by best practices. And just so we are all clear on what that is... this would be a cable that uses individually shielded coaxial signal wires, preferably with an impedance of 75 ohms.

 

Lotharek, I have utmost respect for the products you produce, having several of them of which I've never experienced any problems with, nor any regrets on those purchases. However the HQ video cable is not one of them, and really needs to go back to the drawing board .

 

EDIT: I felt it important to directly respond to this question from Lotharek on the post he made yesterday which I feel is baseless.

 

Question: ...xbox do not make jailbars, so why blame cable when atari does ?

 

Answer:  When the choice of cable makes the difference between jailbars being displayed or not, it's perfectly justifiable to blame the cable that causes their appearance. This is irrelevant of whether the Atari itself is more prone to doing this with a non-shielded cable, then something like an Xbox. Because when you market a cable as being suitable for the 8-bit Atari, it really should produce the best possible picture for this case. Whether it works with an Xbox or anything else that is not an Atari 8-bit doesn't matter what-so-ever, because I'm not plugging this into an Xbox .

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by mytek
Added response to question

[ivop]

38 minutes ago, mytek said:

However the HQ video cable is not one of them, and really needs to go back to the drawing board .

But it sucks if you have 250kg of those cables. Hopefully he hasn't converted them all to Atari style yet. How many cables in a kilo? Three? Four? That's a lot of cables. Perhaps he can still sell them to Xbox owners.

 

[tsom]

On 9/12/2020 at 10:33 AM, tsom said:

Awww. Just noticed my order confirmation says it’s out of stock and I’ll be notified when it ships. So stay tuned

Good news! My cable has shipped!

[+Larry]

Here's a comparison between my old "home-brew" cable and my new double-shielded one. This is with a stock 130XE. My old cable was made from a regular Chroma/Luma/Composite/Audio cable + an S-video cable that was split for Chroma/Luma.  About 9' long -- way too long, but always seemed to work pretty well.  Anyway, I asked the Hercules Workshop guy to make mine 3'.  No problem -- so you can get custom lengths.  I really can't see much difference.  Maybe the double-shielded is a bit sharper?  But I'm glad I got it if for no other reason than to help clean up the "cord clutter" on my desk.

 

(TOP: Double-Shielded BOTTOM: Home-Brew)

[tsom]

On 9/14/2020 at 5:10 PM, tsom said:

Good news! My cable has shipped!

My cable from Hercules Workshop arrived and I gave it a quick test. It is MUCH better than the 8BitClassis cable, and also better than the origin-unknown cable I have. I highly recommend their cables. (I got the one with the RCA jack for sound, so I wouldn't need any adapters and can use a handy RCA-RCA cable for sound.) I will post comparison photos as soon as I can spend some time moving cables around.

[myriadcs]

Just to add my 2c, my Hercules cable just arrived. On my setup I can't see any difference, both Lotharek and Hercules cable give same good quality image

[+mytek]

1 hour ago, myriadcs said:

Just to add my 2c, my Hercules cable just arrived. On my setup I can't see any difference, both Lotharek and Hercules cable give same good quality image

Perhaps a little more info would help.

• PAL or NTSC?
• Computer Model?
• Composite or S-Video in use?
• Monitor Make and Model?
• Were jail bars present with either the new or old cable?

 

[myriadcs]

27 minutes ago, mytek said:

Perhaps a little more info would help.

• PAL or NTSC?
• Computer Model?
• Composite or S-Video in use?
• Monitor Make and Model?
• Were jail bars present with either the new or old cable?

 

Sorry, more details then

 

130XE PAL, S-Video connected to Viewsonic 2060w-1e

No jail bars present (now or in the past). I guess it's monitor/tv thing then. 

I don't have any other device that can test S-Video so it's only my theory.

On the other hand, can't complain, maybe i'm just lucky (most likely  )

[manterola]

I think that this is (obviously) a product of several factors: how good is the ground of each particular MB, the quality of the RAM, where did you picked the ground in the case of UAV, the value of some capacitor in the tv out part of the circuit (or removal of that capacitor), other factors related with the tv/monitor used (technology, filters, lcd vs crt) and finally the cable. If your computer output is great, almost any cable should work ok, if the computer is having problems with timing signals getting into the color video signal, maybe no cable will help. Or when there are ground loops, or different gnd levels between the monitor and the Atari, the video cable and signals inside will carry the currents due to grounding problems. Also the crosstalk between the signals inside the cable shows up in the quality of the image as mytek showed.

All that I am trying to say is: there are multiple "moving parts" or subsystems involved, so the cause of the problem can be located in any of the parts or in all of them.

BTW, I have a Chelco 800XL, beautiful inside and outside, but with a terrible problem of jailbars. No cable have helped me so far, maybe I'll do a UAV upgrade to see if that make it better.

Edited September 23, 2020 by manterola

[+mytek]

20 hours ago, myriadcs said:

Sorry, more details then

 

130XE PAL, S-Video connected to Viewsonic 2060w-1e

No jail bars present (now or in the past). I guess it's monitor/tv thing then. 

I don't have any other device that can test S-Video so it's only my theory.

On the other hand, can't complain, maybe i'm just lucky (most likely  )

I think you happen to have a computer that already produces clean video, and that your previous cable wasn't bad to begin with.

 

Edit: Since your previous cable was the HQ cable, I take back my statement that it wasn't bad to begin with (because without proper shielding it is an inferior cable to the Hercules). So I'm thinking that it's more likely to be monitor related that jail bars are not being seen in your setup. As has already been discussed, the jail bars being displayed or not can also relate to the method employed by the monitor when it processes the incoming video stream.

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by mytek
Retracted original accessment

[jamm]

Add one more data point to the list:

• Atari 800 w/Incognito + UAV (NTSC)
• S-video to RetroTINK to HDMI to recent LCD monitor

Obvious jailbars with both the Lotharek and 8-bit Classics monitor cables.

 

Jailbars completely gone with Hercules Workshop monitor cable.

 

[+mytek]

I think we now have enough data to prove that a poorly shielded Atari DIN to S-video cable can indeed create jail bars in the video image. Notice my emphasis on create, because that is specifically what is happening when the luma and chroma are allowed to mix when connected to an S-video monitor. This mixing can also occur due to poor composite circuit design in some Atari computers, which is the case with at least one model where a capacitor was used to mix the two signals together in order to create a composite output. Unfortunately that method also corrupted the S-video (resulting in jail bars), with the only solution to either remove that capacitor, or wire it to a switch to take it out of circuit whenever clean S-video was desired. However the mixing I am specifically referring to when it comes to video cables, is where the individual luma and chroma signals are not shielded from each other, as is the case with the HQ cable.

 

We could of course go on presenting more examples, but I think it's pretty clear that the HQ cable is not appropriate for S-video use with the Atari.

 

And although some monitors will make up for the HQ cable's deficiencies, still rendering a clean image, I think that in the long run you would be better served by purchasing the Hercules cable instead, and have something that will work with all monitors.

 

[Atari Nut]

How about an Atari DIN to component video cable?  I was told once that shielding is not necessary if the cable is relatively short (6' maybe).  Anyone have experience with these?

[+DrVenkman]

On 9/25/2020 at 9:28 AM, Atari Nut said:

How about an Atari DIN to component video cable?  I was told once that shielding is not necessary if the cable is relatively short (6' maybe).  Anyone have experience with these?

The Atari video output does not produce a component signal. 

[ACML]

On 9/25/2020 at 12:49 AM, mytek said:

This mixing can also occur due to poor composite circuit design in some Atari computers, which is the case with at least one model where a capacitor was used to mix the two signals together in order to create a composite output.

 

Which computer does this?  Would a 1200XL with ClearPic2002 have this issue?

Edited September 26, 2020 by ACML

[+mytek]

3 hours ago, ACML said:

Which computer does this?  Would a 1200XL with ClearPic2002 have this issue?

It's been so long ago, I forget which one it was. I'm sure if you do a search in these forums it'll turn up a few hits on the subject.

 

[Atari Nut]

20 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

The Atari video output does not produce a component signal. 

My error.  I meant "How about an Atari DIN to composite video cable?"