Time passes. And things change. And while the French saying “Plus ça change, plus ça la meme chose” – the more things change the more they stay the same is mostly true (this understanding applies to not all, but most things), some things, at least with AV technology do indeed change a lot.

There are times when I get reflective and contemplative, and think about the things I’ve seen in my time in this channel. Progress is inevitable, and we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for decisions we made that were the best choice we had at the time with what we had available.

Still, there are some choices that ended up being a waste of time and money.

Dismounting the TV from the wall at my old house I reflected that while I ran HDMI, component video and Ethernet in wall to the TV location I really only needed HDMI, the rest was surplus to requirements.

My old 60-inch plasma wasn’t a Smart TV. They exist back then, and I never replaced it with one. Well, I did, I have a new 75-inch LED TV, but I put it in a new house.

That got me thinking about running component video in wall back in the day. It was the best solution at the time, but only very, very briefly. Video over Cat5e arrived and all those runs of triple coax cable for Y/Pb/Pr were obsolete.

And the same applies when it comes to the brief period that were specifying and installing really long HDMI cables, fifty feet or more to locations like projector mounts.

I feel especially guilty about that because not only were the prices for really long HDMI cables exorbitant, but back in the early days HDMI was notoriously unreliable. I spent countless hours on too many projects troubleshooting blank screens where no blank screens should be.

None of this should be interpreted as nostalgia for an idyllic past. AV technologies are SO MUCH BETTER than they used to be.

Are there still headaches? Of course there are, that’s life. But the challenges we faced in the past were fixed by innovation, and we really are better off as a result.

Trust that any problems you’re facing on your projects today will also get solved.