Is there anything it Can’t do?

A note on long distance balanced audio transmission.

Category 5 cable, in its UTP or Unshielded Twisted Pair form, works just fine under almost any circumstances. Trust me. I have been in the industry for better than 15 years, and I have seen some really poor attempts at long distance transmission line for audio purposes. From lamp cord (purchased cheaply at one time on a roll of around 500 feet, before copper prices went through the roof) to various Coaxial cables, none of them stack up as well as Cat5 used in a balanced configuration. Bigger means better only applies to speaker cables. Nominally category 5 cable is approximately 100ohm, and many might argue that this is problematic as it presents a mis-match when compared to typical microphone impedances. However it should be noted that the broad range of impedances presented by equipment available in Mic and Line levels means that this problem already exists with standard microphone and line level signal cables. So long as a low impedance output is connected to a high impedance input (as is always the correct implementation) then the transmission line between them becomes less important so long as it is balanced and the impedance is in the ballpark. In fact, next to keeping balanced, capacitance and DC resistance of the transmission line are far more important than nominal impedance in most scenarios.

Mileage may vary, and under extreme conditions a Balun may be helpful to match impedances and ensure maximum performance (and distance) however under most normal implementations you can put a set of XLR (or TRS if your equipment uses balanced 1/4 plug) connectors onto that Cat5 and get rocking.

All this being said, nothing beats Optical. But that will cost you.

A note on HDMI

Absolutely. With some really inexpensive off-the-shelf Cat5e / Cat6 HDMI extenders you can really do some amazing things. I am seeing more and more Restaurants, Bars and Clubs installing only UTP cabling for all their needs. They use it for the Sound System, the Televisions and Even PoE powered security cameras. For the most part DMX Lighiting controls can run over UTP Cabling as well.

Passive extenders will typically allow runs of up to 66 feet, where active extenders can extend this reach as much as a few hundred feet (for a price). The vast majority of extenders available are HDCP compliant and will therefore carry a full 1080p signal, with audio. Many also include IR passthrough, so you can control that DVB Box or Blu-ray player from the remote set, rather than running to the rack in the electronics room.