User:WaltCip/Cable spaghetti

Cable spaghetti (sometimes known as plastic spaghetti, rat's nest, or cable clutter) is a term used to describe the often undesirable large mass of cables behind or connecting electronic devices, both for computers and entertainment systems.

Cable spaghetti for the home user is caused by the growing number of interconnected devices used in entertainment and computer systems. Whereas a record player and cassette deck were likely the only two components found up to the 1980s, today's systems can have an amplifier (or several if a preamplifier and power amplifier are used, and yet more for a passive subwoofer, a Tactile transducer or alternative transducer), television, CD player, SA-CD player, Laser Disc player, RF demodulator, VCR, DVD player, Blu-Ray disc or HD-DVD player, personal video recorder, cable or satellite tuner, video game console, and computer all connected in the same system. Cable clutter can even cause problems with audio and visual quality due to electromagnetic interference with other cables.

Cable spaghetti can be reduced or even eliminated with a properly designed and used cable management system. However, due to the nature of the work being a time consuming trial-and-error process, few users bother or attempt it. In the context of neatly building computers, the art is known as cablegami.

Computers

New optional peripherals - printers, scanners, external disk drives, microphones, etc. - also add to the cord clutter, and separately powered items do double damage, as they require a power cord as well.

Modern computer systems use USB, a data connection standard which can be used as a data bus. The current design of most USB devices often requires the cables to be attached to a hub. An advantage of USB is that it allows less often used devices to be easily removed when not in use.

Cable spaghetti can be reduced by bus designs that permit daisy chaining. For example, the Apple Desktop Bus on the Apple Macintosh used a single cable chained from one device to another. This both reduced the length needed for cables and distributed the cables over a wider area, removing the potential for wires to catch, snag, or get tangled.

Wireless peripherals, specifically mice, keyboards and printers, have existed for some time. The number of wires required is reduced, but each device needs its own power source. Bluetooth (and, in industrial settings, ZigBee) is starting to replace IrDA and proprietary RF protocols used for wireless computer peripherals and short-haul data communications.

Some products, like the Apple iMac, even use the lack of cable clutter as a selling point to consumers.

Computer Networks

The move, in the early 1990s, from 10BASE2 using coax cable on a bus network to 10BASE-T and 100BASE-T using twisted pair on a star network has increased the number of cables needed. Wireless technologies like 802.11b are one possible solution, as are Power line communication devices that work over existing electrical wiring, but they may introduce other issues like security, interference, reliability, and bandwidth limitations.

In an attempt to reduce Cable Spaghetti or to even prevent it from happening in professional data centers and network centers, cable management systems are a necessity and widely used. Such places have a massive number of computers in a small space. Cable management is included in many racks and things such as raised floors or overhead cable conduits mean more options in the placing and interconnection of cables. However, even a short lapse can convert a nice cable management system into spaghetti.

Entertainment Systems

In the audio world there have been a tremendous number of attempts to provide a single cable containing left and right stereo in and out signals in a single cable. Older Pioneer Electronics systems often include a small round 4-pin DIN jack for this purpose, but so few devices supported it that they eventually gave up on it.

The 21-pin SCART system includes video (bi-directional composite and unidirectional RGB or S-VIDEO) and bidrectional stereo, along with numerous control lines integrated into one cable and has become the standard for AV interconnects in europe. More recently a digital optical fiber solution was proposed that would transmit video, audio, and control signals on a single universal connector.

Developments such as the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) aim to decrease or even eliminate the problem of cable clutter by transferring both surround sound audio and visual data over a small digital interface.