Wireless networking? It's enough to give you a new-found love of cables

Cables, to aficionados of home cinema, are like tyres to car enthusiasts; a desperately essential part of the mix with wide- ranging effects on performance. The subjective merits of each brand, their price-to-performance ratio and the validity of manufacturers' features and claims can be discussed endlessly. But that is only half the reason I am a cable guy.

The other reason is that wireless AV connectivity has always been a fiasco - and appears to be getting worse for the HD-era. Worrying then that a recent report by ABI Research predicts a wireless future for HD and AV in the home by 2013.

The current state of play does not look so promising to me: at least four competing formats (UWB Wi-Fi, WirelessHD, Wireless HDMI and WHDI) none of which are actually finalised. They all have limited range and (like HDMI to be fair) are designed to maximise copy protection rather than enhance AV performance. The technologies using 5GHz or 60GHz carrier signals have a directional 'beam', compounding issues of trying to broadcast to multiple receivers, and a low-power 60GHz signal has about the same chance of penetrating a UK brick wall as a marshmallow drill bit.

No strings attached
No new technology is without teething troubles, but wireless networking has been causing home users grief for over 10 years already. Has anyone set up a Wi-Fi network from scratch and managed to do it seamlessly, quickly and without at least one major headache? I don't mean hooking up a pre-configured AirBook to Starbucks Wi-Fi, I mean starting with an ADSL Wi-Fi router from scratch. Should you accept this mission, your only aid will be a 'quick start guide' that might as well be for the space shuttle, and a premium rate phone number for a help desk staffed by idiots.

For some reason manufacturers of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including our stalwart AV brands, blithely assume you are a qualified network engineer to start with. For example, to quote from Denon's AVP-A1HD manual: 'Set DCHP to OFF and enter the IP Address, subnet mask, default gateway, primary DNS and secondary DNS. Input the SSID. Input Encryption Key. If WEP select the default key.' You are then presented with an onscreen display offering a big matrix of numbers and a host of three-letter acronyms. At this stage, there is about a 15 per cent max chance of anything actually working.

Personally, I haven't worn a subnet mask since a fancy-dress gig back in my university days, and I've recently sorted out my default gateway with new hinges and a coat of Ronseal. Seriously, until last year I thought a MAC address was where you headed if you fancied a burger and fries. This is PC-based networking speak at its most insular and I doubt the new HD-capable wireless technologies will be any better. I reckon there's little chance of any wireless HD system being truly simple to use, offering simultaneous one-to-many distribution, or maintaining the AV quality of a damn good cable.

In my opinion there have been far too many developments in media entertainment that are
a retrograde step for quality - MP3 audio, HDMI's content-protection obsession over reducing jitter, and compressed web-based video formats for starters. Let's hope that wireless HD streaming doesn't go the same way.

In the meantime, I am going to revel in my gold-plated connectors, clean my contacts with proprietary fluids and spend Sundays debating the subjective merits of deep cryogenic treatment and silver-plated oxygen-free copper conductors. Cables - everything a robust, high-bandwidth, plug 'n' play, multimedia interface should be.