A cautionary tale - electrical cables and connections can and do fail. A month ago we started using Optimum Online's cable modem service. The service has generally been excellent, but the supplied cable turned out to be bad.
After a day with the service we lost net. I spent some time digging through the wall looking for ancient splitters. I rewired what was buried and replaced all of the splitters with modern units with high quality connections. The wires in the walls were also replaced and all connections were carefully tightened.
A few days later net disappeared again. Moving the cable modem to the only other TV outlet in the house gave a solid connection. Looking at the supplied cable showed that moving it around could cause Net to go away ...
I wonder how much money they spend in tech support dealing with bad connector and bad cable issues.
So here is something that will save you money and frustration over time. Inspect all of your TV and stereo cables and replace any that don't have high quality connectors. The cables themselves are less important (eg ... you don't need to spend $10 a foot on Monster Cables), but the connectors should be heavily plated with gold. Make sure the connections are tight. Threaded connectors (like F connectors on TVs) generally need to be tighter than what most fingers supply ... I like to torque them to spec (about 3.4 newton-meters), but that is probably overkill.
When you get new equipment it makes sense to budget a little for good cables - it is likely that the supplied cables are substandard.
I finally managed to look at the bad cable. My test gear at home isn't sophisticated, but the cable loss at a few hundred MHz on the 12 foot cable varied by about 12dB just by bending the cable slightly. I've seen similar problems on S video and RGB cables on high end video gear. One wonders how many $5k home audio/video systems are ruined by a $4 cable.
Gregg points out that providing some strain relief to cable connections is important. If a cable is hanging under its own weight it can be useful to provide a bit of support with a string.
12:03:44 AM 
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