Made Entertaiment on Your Car

As another reviewer has mentioned, this unit is designed to be used in a car, since it’s designed for 12 volts DC. (I guess I’m too old for this stuff. As if booming 800W car stereos aren’t enough, are people outfitting their cars with a DVD player for every seat now?) But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it at home as we are.

In our case, we have a home surveillance system using a dedicated DVR. The DVR has baseband (i.e. “video”) output that we send to various LCD monitors throughout the house. It’s a big house with lots of electrical wiring and other signal cables in the attic. We’re using a converter box Kworld 1680EX LCD Tv Tuner Box Support HD 1080I High Quality Image to convert the signal to VGA. Even tho we’re using RG-6 Quad everywhere, after the splitters and all, there was some signal degradation, and I needed an inexpensive baseband amplifier to boost the signal strength. This does the trick!

I don’t know the S/N figures, but it seems clean. You can adjust the output level, which is helpful for good vertical sync. (Install the amp right after the signal source for lowest noise.) I asked our professional installer how much industry amps cost. He said the last one he bought was about $200.

If you don’t have a 12 volt power supply or wall wart handy, you can tap your UPS battery for power. (You are using a UPS on your surveillance system, right?) Inputs and outputs are all RCA, so you may need BNC to RCA adapters in a professional surveillance system.

There is a similar unit Boss Audio BV-AM5 Video Signal Amplifier that appears to be exactly the same thing, just rebranded and with a different housing. The price on the Boss is cheaper, but there’s no free shipping with it. We’re more comfortable buying direct from Amazon and since we bought two Soundstorms, the free shipping made the price difference a wash.
Rating: 5 / 5