[darkness1970us]

Okay, I hope this is in the right place.

A little information about what I am trying to do:

I have three televisions and about a half dozen video game systems. The televisions sit right next to one another, and the systems will be on a rack (right now they are under the televisions). Currently, 2-3 systems are plugged into each of the televisions with a switch box, as well as a DVD player on one of them.

What I would like to do is wire each television into an 8 way switch box, and have every system and the DVD player split to each of those boxes. This way anyone can select the system from the rack on the television they are going to use.

I've done a search for the switch box, and found it with no problem. I am having some difficulty finding RCA splitters. Y-connectors seem to be common enough, but I need to split to 3 different directions. I've found 4-way splitters with signal amps, but I don't think I should need an amp if the signal should only be on one television at a time (and really don't want to spend $100 each for 8 splitters.)

Anyone know if the amp is really needed, and if not where I can get 3 way splitters? Thank yo.

[ebaines]

Couple of thoughts:

1. You may be able to make up your own 3-way RCA-style splitter using components from Radio Shack. They're not difficult to wire up.

2. However, you should be aware that splitting signals like this can cause degradation to the signal quality. It really doesn't matter whether all the various TVs and games are all on or not - as you split the signal the power levels get split too, but an even worse effect is that if the signals aren't properly terminated you can get all sorts of terrible reflections in the signal, due to the mis-match of impedance. A well designed splitter (or the amplifier box you mentioned) should be designed to take this into account. This may not be too much of an issue if the RCA cords are carrying audio only, but if you're using them for the picture signal, you may find the picture quality suffers without a well-designed splitter.

[darkness1970us]

That gives me some info to work on. I'll hit Radio Shack this week and see what I'm looking at to make up some wires for the older systems (N64, PS-One, Super Nintendo). I'll probably have to bite the bullet and drop the money on the amps for the newer systems, as a degradation of quality for those would actually be noticeable. As far as the termination, the switch boxes are store bought, and should take that into account. Thank you.