Cable Connectors

Cables and cable connectors are ubiquitous in today’s connected world filled with communication devices. You are going to need them for your computer, car, TV, smartphone, internet, and whatnot.

A connector is actually the metal contact at the end of a cable that enables you to connect it to a compatible jack or socket. This will help you complete the communication circuit and allow the device to do whatever it is supposed to do. When choosing a new plug or a connector, there is a range of variables you need to take into account. The number and type of pins, as well as the amperage and voltage involved, are just some of them. Read this article to find out more about cable connectors. Having a better understanding of them will help you make the right choices while shopping for them.

Different types of cable connectors

Electrical cables were first used in the nineteenth century. Well, this is not surprising as it was the same time when Edison invented electricity. But those cables were quite simple. However, modern electrical devices have grown more powerful and complex. This has also created a need for different types of cables and, as a result, cable connectors. In order to be able to find the right type of connector for your need, you should have at least a basic idea about these connectors. Here is a list of the four most common types of cable connectors.

RCA cable

There is hardly any consumer electronics that use RCA cables today. Another way of putting it is that RCA is almost an obsolete standard. But if you have a television or DVD player from ten years ago, you might find that they use RCA connectors. RCA connectors have three leads on either side. There will be the yellow connector that carries the video signal, and the white and red one that carries the left and right audio. A typical RCA cable will be around one metre long, although there are some longer versions of the same.

XLR cables

This connection standard is used exclusively in professional audio gear. So, it is XLR cables that connect the microphone to the amplifiers and sometimes even amplifiers to the speakers. There used to be XLR connectors with seven different pin configurations: two-pin, three-pin, four-pin, five-pin, six-pin, seven pins, and the PDN connector. Out of these two pin connectors are obsolete because of the availability of better options that are affordable to the average consumer. Connectors with higher pin configurations are also useful in applications like stage lighting and video transmission.

USB connector

USB is the acronym for Universal Serial Bus. This connector has dominated the world of computer peripherals for the last twenty years and even today. Continuous innovations and huge improvements in performance from generation to generation have made USB connectors quite useful and relevant. The latest standard in the industry is USB 4.0 that uses USB-C for power supply. USB 4.0 can support a file transfer speed of up to forty gigabytes per second. This is four times faster than the thunderbolt connectors that can simultaneously transfer 10 Gbs of data in either direction.

HDMI connector

One of the oldest standards for digital video transmission used to be the VGA cables. They were ubiquitous in computers and DVD players. However, the downside was the small display resolution and also the lack of support for audio transfer. HDMI came out during the early 2000s with a huge leap in both video transmission speed and also added support for simultaneous 6.1 audio channels. The later versions of HDMI could also support internet connectivity as well. However, as we started watching videos in 4K and 8K, the DisplayPort standard seems to be the latest trend. DisplayPort 2.0 can even support 16K HDR video at 60 Hz.