gizmodo.com: Traveling for work usually involves bringing along a small mountain of electronics, each with cables that need to tag along too. But a new Kickstarter promises to replace them all—power, video, and audio—with a single multi-headed cord that can handle any connection that wireless hasn't already replaced.
4 comments:
When I saw the title to the article I was expecting it to be a universal cable for more industrial use. Something like: “This cable can be anything you need it to be, category cable, audio, video, data, power, anything you need” and the idea would be that you could plumb a building with a single kind of cable, or two kinds, small and large for data and power, and then just terminate to please. I know in a way this is what they already do in a sense, but the idea would be to be much more universal with it. There are a couple problems that I can see with the universal cable that they pitched here. 1) It doesn’t seem like it has a name. Is it just called the TOB cable? 2) Usually the reason that I travel with multiple cords, or just have a pile of cords is because I have devices for all the cords, and I might need to plug them all in at the same time. If I just bought one of these to replace my other cords, I would be limited, and if I bought a bunch to replace all my cords for simultaneous use, what would have been the point of buying a bunch of cables to replace a bunch of cables. 3) I would very quickly loose all of the little raptor heads. I don’t want more little gadgets that I have to keep track of. 4) Actually, this isn’t so much of a problem, but I’ve always needed an HDMI to 1/8” audio cable adapter. Despite some of its inherent shortcomings, I think it’s a handy device, and would certainly be useful in some situations.
I don’t know what I feel about this cable. It seems both like it would be a nifty thing that would help in various situations (particularly if it worked as a converter) but it also feels like it’s just one of those expensive crappy gadgets that doomed Radio Shack. I hear a lot about the ideal universal chord that could connect anything to anything and just magically work, and I don’t think that that is necessarily the standard I want to live with. I know that I absolutely don’t want a cable that could accidentally fry my ethernet port with 120V power. The reason that some cables have different connectors is so that you can not plug it into anything that will damage what is on the other end. Because of this, I think that cable management shouldn’t seek a single cable to become a universal standard. Different types of connections need different types of standards, factors such as impedance for instance. Many data cables use twisted pairs, others use coaxial cables, and that isn’t right for certain power connections. There are different standards for a reason, and what people should be doing is trying to reduce the redundancy in those standards without trying to make a headphone jack a USB connector.
As intriguing as the cables are to be, I would just find it a bit difficult to be able to make them that interchangeable with everything else, because all cables are laid out in a particular way. I don’t know much about how cables are made, but if there is a possibility of something like this working, then I would possibly get on board with the program. Although now that you’ve eliminated all of the cables that would make it difficult to transport them all around, now you’ve got multiple heads that attach to the cable, if you lost one of them, you’ve made it fairly difficult to now make the cable what it’s supposed to be. Are there upsides to this item? Yes. Are there downsides? Of course. Not everyone is going to get what they want when it comes to technology, sometimes you’re just going to have to work with what you’ve got.
The idea of a single all universal cable sounds like a really great one to me. In my bag I consistently have around five or six cables at any one time. They vary from my computer charger, to 1/8” TRS audio cables for my speakers, and USB chargers for my phone and every other device in between. The idea of a single cable replacing all of that sounds like an amazing innovation for space and reducing waste, by saving materials in cable production. I’d love to see this idea innovated elsewhere in the future. It would be amazing to see cable runs that are extremely flexible in terms of use, imagine having one universal cable for all departments, that can be used with adaptors to send any power or signal one might need. Load ins would become extremely streamline and efficient as all departments could work together to run cable for an entire production at once, also it would make the switching out of equipment a lot easier since you wouldn’t have to run an entirely new cable, but simply switch out an adaptor. Of course this kickstarter design isn’t addressing this full scale, but the idea being perused is extremely innovative and could led to greater implementations.
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