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(More customer reviews)For quite a while I had been contemplating getting an active return amplifier. I have cable modem issues from time to time, but a very good TV picture due to a previous amp I purchased. I read that the Electroline is the best out there, but after taking a look at the $120 price tag I had to think twice. There are a number of other products with an Active Return label on them, but I wanted to be sure I got a good one, and that it worked as expected. Taking full advantage of Amazon's return policy, I decided to buy both and compare them.
Both amplifiers are solidly built. The Electroline is quite large compared to the other amp I have 4 PORT CABLE TV / HDTV / DIGITAL AMPLIFIER INTERNET MODEM SIGNAL BOOSTER INTERNET AMP, but it looked very solid with a nice grey matte finish. The PCT VC-9U is slightly smaller with a glossy white finish. It has 9 output ports, and I will get into those in a minute. For mounting, The PCT does have a neat advantage that the Electroline does not, which is the ability to mount it vertically or horizontally. The PCT has 2 sets of mounting brackets (I will try to post a photo later), and this made it easier for me to mount the amp on the cieling of my garage, with 2 screws into the bottom of the joist.
I hooked up the Electroline first and connected it up to my cable plant. Everything worked just fine. My picture was just as good as before, but now my cable modem synced up faster and seemed to be quicker, or maybe I was just expecting it to be faster :). When I pulled the power to see what would happen, I lost everything - cable modem and my TV picture. I left it installed for a couple of days, and during that time I had a problem where the picture got some white bars in it. After contacting the seller, I was told that I probably had a bad power supply and that it was a common problem. I would have to return the amp for replacement. How convenient.
When the electroline broke I put the PCT in place. The difference here was that I had a choice of where to connect my cable modem. The PCT comes with 9 ports, not 8. The 9th port is a non-amplified port labeled MODEM. First I tried the MODEM port. The cable modem actually worked a bit better than with my old amp, and I think this had something to do with the return path. My old amp had a 7dB return path loss, while the modem port on the PCT has a 5dB loss. The modem did seem to connect without a problem. Since they advertise that everything will still work if the power fails, I pulled the plug on the amp - and my modem did not miss a beat. It stayed connected. Of course if the power is out, who is going to be surfing the internet? It was a nice test though, and if I had a VOIP phone I guess it would have kept working. With the amp unplugged, the TV got very fuzzy and the digital cable went out altogether.
I did not see any performance difference between the electroline and PCT. My only measure was simply looking at the picture and judging how it looked, and seeing how the cable modem reacted. No real difference between the amps that I could tell. Because the Electroline was broken I had to return it. The PCT at half the price was working great, so I just decided to keep it. I ultimately decided to connect the cable modem to one of the other ports that were amplified. A power failure will knock out the cable modem. No big deal. I don't have a VOIP phone, so I am not worried about the power thing. The TV picture was great, and the cable modem worked fine either way. I still have a couple of ports available for expansion.
SO my take on this - if you can spare the money, the reviews say the electroline is the way to go. Since the PCT is a new product no one else has commented on it yet. But at half the price and the same performance (along with the 9th port) the PCT VC-9U seems to be a slam dunk on the bang-for-the-buck side.
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