OT: Need AV advice, For a Sports bar environment Options

[skline]

Are there any AV specialists out there? I am hooking up 13 or so TV/monitors up to multiple cable/satellite boxes. They want to be able to watch 12 different games on 12 different monitors and switch them around. I need some advice on what to get in the way of Video monitors and such. Whatcha got?

[sj914]

If you're setting up cable all you would need are splitters to split the signals to the different boxes. If your wiring in for satellite i.e. dishnetwork or directv you are going to need a switch. The switch combines the two coax's together and gets split to single coaxs cables and then goes to the separate sat boxes. If you don't use a switch what happens is half the sat boxes will get even channels only and the other half will get odd channels only. Also if your going with Satellite your going to need rg6 coax especially if your cable runs are longer than 100ft or so. I found out the hard way when I used regular coax to run from my switch to the living room which after it goes through the walls is pretty long. You might be able to get away with using regular coax for shorter runs, but the signal degradation will show up on the longer runs of cable. Mostly the box will not get a very good signal with the combination of long cable runs and using regular coax, so to stay on the safe side just run every coax in the system with rg6.

As far as monitors, there's LCD, Plasma, good ol' regular tube tv, etc... just bring money for high end systems.

Now if you want to get fancy you can always setup all the cable/sat. boxes in one place and then plugging it into a computer that has multiple video in/out. Doing it this way you can even set it up to record as it displays on the screen(s) You can even setup a PVR setup for each one, but thats a completey different mess all together and I wouldn't even try it unless you have all the time and money.