At any rate, I purchased this s-video cable since it was marketed as “quad-shielded”:

S-video Cable – 6 ft
Price: —

11 used & new available from USD 3.45

and it made no difference whatsoever… This is a very well-made cable – I highly recommend it if you actually need an s-video cable! That wasn’t my problem, however.

I spent some more time crawling around behind my entertainment center. I swapped more cables, tried different inputs on the television, different outputs on the DVD player, removed my pre-amp from the equation, and then finally tried an entirely different television connected directly to the DVD player. The problem is, of course, the DVD player – it just adds the pattern to its own output. It’s always the last place you look…

So I ordered this DVD player:

Toshiba XDE600 1080p Upconverted DVD Extended Detail
Price: —

5 used & new available from USD 49.97

It’ll be useful in the household for quite a while, I think. It up-converts and has HDMI outputs, so any new televisions will connect without issue. Of course my current set-up is not HDMI-enabled, and I was determined not to turn an $11 cable problem into $4000 of television and A/V receiver. Alas, the final factor in picking this model was that it has both s-video and SP/DIF outputs!

Take a look around for recent DVD players that support s-video. No really, I’ll wait… Not so easy, huh? You’d think that it would be a no-brainer to have the plug on the back, since the signals are already available inside the device. Most current DVD players have HDMI, component, and composite – but no s-video. Well, I can’t video-switch component, there is no HDMI on the television (or anywhere else for that matter), and composite is soooo 1956. Decision made.

After placing the order, I found a fairly complete list of features at CyberTheater, as well as an good explanation of the XDE technology at current.com.