I’ve scrolled past this meme countless times, but somehow I didn’t think of this before now: What does an composite video signal sound like?Anyone have the hardware to test it out and record the sound for me?
I’ve opened serial terminals to serial mice, and I’ve abused /dev/dsp with random binaries I’ve fancied at the moment, but it never dawned on me to plug the red or white RCA jack into the yellow port in the mame of science, and now I only have audio RCA…
In the worse quality TV, putting the composite video into an audio line would make the speakers do a short distorted buzz, then cutoff. The higher quality TVs won’t even flinch. Their internal processing was fast enough to detect the wrong thing was connected, that the signal modulation never even made it to the amplifier. But to our ears it was probably just a bunch of electronic farts.
I do t m ow what it sounds da like but i know what it looks like. It’s basically modulating for every line of your TV high is bright and low is black with a marker for each line.
S-video was a mini DIN connector which wouldn’t have fit into one of these RCA jacks.
If you’d put composite video (the yellow RCA cable in this setup) into one of the audio jacks, pretty much all TVs would not do anything with it as an incompatible signal. If they actually tried to turn it into something, it wouldn’t be audible. Composite video generates a signal at something like 5-10Mhz, human hearing tops out around 20Khz (250-500x lower)
You can always drag out the signal to frequency shift it or something similar. It’s done all the time in astronomy as an example to create visualizations.
I guess it depends how much of a frequency shift you do, but I imagine with the blanking intervals it will mostly just sound like a nasty sawtooth wave?
Anything during the 90s to early 00s sold in Europe came with a SCART connector as the main AV connector. If it wasn’t a direct-from-the-unit SCART cable, there would have been an adapter block to turn the RCA into SCART.
It wasn’t uncommon for cheap TVs to only have RF and SCART.
Also “is this something I’m too X to understand” is a meme format, I’m aware of other connectors.
If I may interject here, but in actuality the system users are using is not, in fact, “Linux” but is actually GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux
Component, composite, s-video and stereo sound in one cable. Although it did mean that you’d have to be careful because a cable to something like a PS2 might only implement the lowest quality of them.
I mean to be fair, usually these were tucked away in the back of a heavy, wooden TV cabinet where it was dark and difficult to reach into to match the colours, even with a torch; and you couldn’t just feel your way around the back to plugging them in because they all felt the same.
You gotta remember that in the Old World, 100 years is not a long time. It’s only like 30 years. So in the 90s, they were 100 years ago and hadn’t invented flashlights yet so they used torches instead.
The problem with RCA cables wasn’t the colors, it was the fact that the back of the tv was huge and you really wanted to not have to get back there. HDMI you can install by feel
These were clearly all done by either children or by adults who never learned to moderate their use of force. All gas no brakes. Zero sense of finesse.
Or have 0 patience and gets frustrated easily and gives in to the monkey brain solution then eventually calms down and swallows their pride and brings it in to get fixed.
Want to know something even better? PS5s showed up on eBay like this within a month of release. Good money to be made if you were handy with a soldering iron.
Also some devices would have like 5 sets of these connectors. You’d be playing around with the remote and plugging and unplugging stuff until you found the right one.
It’s a pain in the ass and I usually fail, but sometimes it works. Though far more importantly, it’s easier to get behind a flat screen with a swivel base than a big crt. RCA cables were on their way out when bigger tvs stopped weighing so damn much and taking up so much depth
They’re often too tight or too loose, and you have to reach behind closets so you can’t see the color to match, and you have to put them in at weird angles.
I haven’t used a single TV/receiver back in the day that worked first try. You’d have to twist that one port, pull the other one out slightly, or constantly try to push it upwards to get a good signal. Kids really don’t know how good they have it with HDMI.
I completely forgot about that but youre right. I remember plugging these cables in at my aunts house and needing to balance a vhs tape on them to apply down pressure so the signal on the tv wasnt black and white.
And every component cord I’ve used had some way of separating the two audio cords from the three video cords. I’ve struggled more trying to figure out which way is up on an HDMI.
When I was 8 or so I watched three old ladies one of whom was my great aunt try to figure out how to connect a DVD player to a tv and just couldnt. I even told them to stick to the same row for all the cables but noooo I was a kid and they knew better, I was sent to my room. Twenty minutes later they figured it out, im 24 and still fucking annoyed at that shit.
It may well have been that his crime was acting like he knew how to do it while being 8. I had old people like that around when I was a kid. And I was a very respectful kid
I’m envious! They at least try. My mom usually buys something new, continues to use the old one till it breaks or not at all (if I don’t intervene). Because attaching a hdmi cable and power cord is too much hassle to even start thinking about. I’ve only last week connected her old cd player and amplifier that was still standing there after she moved 3 years ago. I would do it sooner but she even hates it when I start doing. Oh and not like she’s actually going to use the audio equipment… Radio on the TV sounds just as good, obviously… Ah when she was moving I discovered she had a whole new stereo set still in boxes that she never bothered to even unpack! You know, in case the one she wasn’t already using died or something…
This is why I treat kids with respect and understanding. Everyone I meet may know something I’ve never even considered, and it’s worth the time to at least hear them out. It also means that kids tend to trust and respect me without me needing to try to assert any authority, so that’s good.
I miss the silver plastic era of AV equipment. Like in the mid-to-late 2000s when every TV was made of silver plastic, and it had that set of composite jacks under a flap on the front, so you could temporarily plug things in, like when your buddy brought his PS2 over. There was a button near the channel and volume buttons that switched between inputs, and it didn’t take a digital act of congress to figure out which setting would get it to display on the TV.
Now everything is a black rectangle with bullshit software and almost two HDMI ports in the back, except one has the sound bar plugged into it, and the labels are stamped into the black plastic and not painted on, and with the shadows behind the television you can’t read them. And it doesn’t work when plugged in anyway. Its easier to just not have friends so that you never have to plug other electronics in. Stare at your phones alone.
Because then you can use the ARC protocol to minimize the number of remotes. The TV will pass volume controls through the HDMI port and the sound bar will adjust volume.
So just don’t use the built in software. I don’t have any of my TVs connected to the internet or use their built in OS. I have a couple of Apple TVs plugged in and run everything off that. Never even set the things up beyond plugging them in and switching to HDMI 1.
There’s also the Chromecast TV if you use Android.
If you use a separate smart tv device like those, then the only thing you need to care about on the TV itself is resolution, refresh, and number of ports. Or if you want to spend a chunk of change then you can look into things like OLED. But the separate devices make the TV OS irrelevant.
My personal TV is a Samsung commercial display unit; it isn’t Roku or Tizen or whatever else. It’s still very much a computer though, it still has a network port and keeps pestering about connecting to the internet and registering it and all that shit.
You have to do it without looking tho. That said, I actually found them easier than hdmi. With hdmi, even if I have it the right way I sometimes think it’s the wrong way because it isn’t aligned properly.
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