The age old HDMI quality myth...

To be honest if you want HDMI over 20m with any sort of chance of a working signal you'll have to look at HDMI-over-CAT 5 baluns, no expensive copper will help you.
 
Reminds me of the time I was round a mates house and his dad was using one of those cd lens cleaners through his cd player. When it was done he has totally convinced that it sounded "cleaner"

On avforums a while back someone claimed that staff in a certain competitors stores are all encouraged to push the more expensive cables for chances of winning prizes. Think the top prize was a car
 
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panthro said:
Im no digital expert, but how can you get degradation from a digital signal?
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A digital signal is still carried by an analogue wave - over long distances the initially square wave will eventually round off and decrease in amplitude.

If it does this too much, the wave at the receiving end will struggle to hit the voltage boundaries that mark a 0 or a 1, and if it's very high frequency, the bits can blur together.

As said over short distances even with poor copper, this won't be a problem - but over longer distances or like the guy said - if you have a large amount of equipment all strung together, you /could/ be subject to a loss of information. Most digital equipment will use and then clean up the signal going onwards though, so it shouldn't be too bad.
 
Skyfall said:
Errr... Interference, can we please also dispel the myth that as HDMI is digital "you either get the whole perfect picture or nothing".

TY
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Its pretty much true though, there is no soft roll off like with analogue, once you get beyond fixable degradation you get sparklies then picture/audio breakup very very quickly.
 
bam0 said:
Its pretty much true though, there is no soft roll off like with analogue, once you get beyond fixable degradation you get sparklies then picture/audio breakup very very quickly.
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'Sparklies' are still degradation, just looks a bit different to analogue degradation.

It is however much easier to get 0s and 1s down a cable than it is modulated analogue... Digital telly can be a bit artifacty at the moment, but that's because we're running on low power until analogue terrestrial is turned off, then it'll get ramped up.
 
bam0 said:
Its pretty much true though, there is no soft roll off like with analogue, once you get beyond fixable degradation you get sparklies then picture/audio breakup very very quickly.
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Well not sure what you mean by "break up" and personally as I have never tested a hdmi cable to its limits there's no way I can say with absolute certainty, but it's like having a bad signal on digital TV, you will get artifacts all over the place.

Just saying that in many of these threads people claim that as it's digital it either receives the signal or not, but people seem to confuse a bit (1 or 0) with an entire picture. The type of picture distortion that are extremely unlikely if not impossible with digital images are ghosting, faint pictures and brightness etc..

My mate recently got a new HDMI cable as his old one was apparently causing deep black areas to pixellate, new cable fixed it... Allegedly.
 
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