repair of an HDMI cable

[mcluma]

Repair of an HDMI cable

The lounge was already finished and fully decorated when I moved my AV equipment in. However wife and kids didn’t like the color of the lounge, something like to wrong tint of white. So as usuall she changed it. My wife is very handy with a paintbrush and to redecorate a room wouldn’t take her longer than a few hours. She will cover everything and her cutting in is second to none

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However moving stuff around is a different story. When they moved the AV unit they managed to snag one of my HDMI cables and broke the plug. And yes you guessed it . It was the 10meter HDMI cable which runs from the TV to the AV unit, the one that is fully build into the walls and ceiling, replacing that one is mere impossible. So for about 5 months I had a cable laying on the ground from the TV back to the AV unit. (My wife accepted it for a while as she had broken the plug, but even that has its limits)

So I had to repair the plug, I had read about splicing in a new cable, just a foot of cable with the plug

So I bought another very high end cable (the one in the wall is a gold plated double shielded HDMI cable – didn’t want any loss of quality over that length)

So I carefully set about to start to splice this new cable in. and I can tell you its tough:
a) The new cable has complete different color coding – I had already learned from the Internet that all cable manufactures have their own color coding, and yes the cable I bought was as expected from a different supplier
b) The grouping inside the cable is completely different. My cable had 5 shielded groups of 3 where ass the new cable on 4 shielded groups of 3
c) Then the biggest miss – my cable had in total 20 wires where the new one only 17 (this means less shielding) – not high end as one expected – I did get my money back but so what?

I managed to get it work, so I thought, quality was considerable less, so a no go. So I could buy a new “high end” cable and go through this whole experience again or…

I had seen these solder less connectors, but at Gbp40 I thought a stupid price. Found this one on the web and to make sure the connections are going to work, I also bought a tester

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Then back to connecting the stuff back up again. And even with a tester its still not easy, and help from the Internet is limited as all suppliers have different coding, so its trail and error. Took me two hours but in the end got it to work. Bought a new high end short HDMI cable to connect it all back up again from this connector to my AV equipment

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Fully taped up, these wires are very delicate and break so easy

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My cheat sheet

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The broken plug – which I had to use to find the connecting points back again, but as the inside was broken it was only a help for 14 connections, the rest was trail and error

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The multimeter – which was very handy in finding the connection back from the plug to the new connector

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And all back to how it should be, just need to tidy up the cables, but they are normally hiding by the subwoofer

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And a working TV – and no more cables over the ground

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[Sam Gangee]

Thanks for the comprehensive report (but you might like to correct "trail and error").

For securing wires in plugs, try "Sugru" silicone putty.

Had it been mine, I'd have cut the cable and fitted wall plates. In fact the connector you bought looks as if it's meant to fit into a wall plate.

 

[SimonH2]

Yeah, cables like this are "a bit of a pain" to work with. Many years ago, a customer asked me to shorten a SCSI cable for him, it was from an Apple laptop with their proprietary cable, to a 25pin socket IIRC. It only needed to be short, but was around a metre long IIRC. By the time I'd finished, I'd regretted not saying no !

But, do you have access from the room above ?
If so, then (while it's too late now) I'd have said to install some trunking so you can add/change/remove cables as needed. It does need to be quite big to take HDMI cables. It certainly save problems like this.