HDMI cables - expensive better than cheap?

I have to side with the "there's no difference" brigade. I have maybe 7 or 8 cables between 1-2m long, all fine. Bought a 15m one for my PJ to Onkyo amp, cost me £12, absolutely fine.
My friend is an old-fashioned audiophile, but is a little out of touch with things now.

He was going on about directional HDMI cables?
Is this more BS?
 
Banzai_Joe said:
He was going on about directional HDMI cables?
Is this more BS?
Click to expand...

Directional HDMI cable? Lolololololol.

BS of the highest order, unless it's an active cable with a 'booster' for long cable runs, AFAIK these are directional.
 
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Banzai_Joe said:
I'm lol'ing with ya buddy....but i don't know why......:confused:

I actaully have one of his at home, but whay are they supposed to do, specifically?
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See my edited post above, if they are active (ie have boosters/repeaters) then they are directional for the repeaters to work correctly, however if they are like the passive directional speaker cables you can get it's some BS about 'aligned molecules'. LOL.
 
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EllisDJ said:
What do you thinm of this relayed to sound over HDMI

Is this BS as well from Pioneer??

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They say the same about USB cables too. People spend £500 on a USB cable that goes to their DAC. Surely if everything makes a difference they would try different USB controllers but they've not mentioned it :rolleyes:

EDIT: Crap, maybe I've given them an idea to sell £1000 'Audiophile' USB controller cards now! :p

I will admit I'm very sceptical of all of this as it literally is just digital data however I would like to try and hear the difference myself.
 
Source http://www.stuff.tv/news/life-etc/stuff/pioneer-joins-forces-with-air-studios-for-amazing-audio

"The secret weapon behind Pioneer's high quality audio is PQLS technology. Pioneer's enhanced PQLS technology aims to reduce distortion caused by timing errors and adjusts the transmission rate between a DVD player or CD player and the amplifier. In a nutshell, it's a multi-channel sound designed to eliminate the jitter distortion and generally improve your sound experience and hopefully leave you open-mouthed.

Following a sample of what felt like one minute too many of Elton John on the piano, with and without PQLS, the quality was clear enough for everyone to hear. Without it, the sound was pretty decent but not without echo-y flaws and sporadic sound.

When sampling the sound with the PQLS technology, the difference in quality was incredible. The transmission was jitter-less, and produced a fuller and much richer sound with great bass, along with clean and open sound that was a lot tighter and definitely more intense. The process was then repeated with a snippet from The Quantum of Solace, and again, the difference in sound was amazing"
 
EllisDJ said:
Why would you want USB to DAC??
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I was talking about the Audiophile USB DAC's you can buy. Not entirely related to this HDMI discussion but that video reminded me of an article I saw touting the benefits of a really expensive USB cable which supposedly improved audio performance.
 
EllisDJ said:
What do you thinm of this relayed to sound over HDMI

Is this BS as well from Pioneer??

Click to expand...

No that isn't BS. It's a technology that serves a purpose, no matter how small and "audiophilistic" it is.

It has nothing to do with cabling, signal quality or anything like that though. It's purely down to improving digital-to-analog conversion, specifically in the area of a more accurate clock frequency than normal.

You have to be careful when getting involved in all these proprietary "post processing" technologies though. Ultimately they ARE fiddling with the raw data. It's easy to provoke a "omg it sounds so much better" response just by playing with the equalizer dials, particularly on the low bass frequencies. Cause everybody loves a bit more bass on a James Bond action movie don't they?
 
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without PQLS by my undertsanding the audio jitter is created by two clocks of decoders running independently. One on the source and the other on the receiver.

What causes the signal /clocks to go out of time??
if its not related to the transmission of the signal / the receipt of the signal?

surely the cable design/materials etc must have an effect if even svery small i.e. it gets there quicker or something I dont know

in a previous post someone (a strong worded individual) mentioned the signal was converted into analogue to be transmitted?? Is this true?
 
Zefan said:
The signal going down the cable is an analogue one, modulated using frequency shift keying to represent the digital source that it is converted back into when it's received. Even if the cable is of a poor enough quality to degrade the signal to a level below that which the receiver can discriminate a 1 or 0 properly the information will just be lost. There should be no "dimming of the picture" or "loss of punch" in the audio, you should simply get clear artifacts, just like you do when watching a poor digital TV signal or listening to a scratched CD.

.
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NathanE said:
No that isn't BS. It's a technology that serves a purpose, no matter how small and "audiophilistic" it is.

It has nothing to do with cabling, signal quality or anything like that though. It's purely down to improving digital-to-analog conversion, specifically in the area of a more accurate clock frequency than normal.

You have to be careful when getting involved in all these proprietary "post processing" technologies though. Ultimately they ARE fiddling with the raw data. It's easy to provoke a "omg it sounds so much better" response just by playing with the equalizer dials, particularly on the low bass frequencies. Cause everybody loves a bit more bass on a James Bond action movie don't they?
Click to expand...

It's just an implementation of HDMI 1.3s audio rate control and will only make a difference on LPCM audio, bit streamed audio which is what most people will be passing to their receiver as the receiver should have better DACs than the player is completely unaffected by it. It's not proprietary and it doesn't necessarily include any processing of the sound.

7.11 Audio Rate Control Overview
The Audio Rate Control feature allows a Sink to slightly and continuously adjust the audio clock rate of the Source in order to match the Sink’s crystal-based audio clock. The Sink controls the Source’s audio clock rate with the CEC <Set Audio Rate> command. See CEC Supplement section CEC 13.16 for details. Source ACR behavior is not affected by Audio Rate Control. When Audio Rate Control is enabled the Source shall continue to generate correct ACR packets that accurately reflect the current (possibly adjusted) audio clock rate.
Click to expand...
 
EllisDJ said:
without PQLS by my undertsanding the audio jitter is created by two clocks of decoders running independently. One on the source and the other on the receiver.

What causes the signal /clocks to go out of time??
if its not related to the transmission of the signal / the receipt of the signal?

surely the cable design/materials etc must have an effect if even svery small i.e. it gets there quicker or something I dont know

in a previous post someone (a strong worded individual) mentioned the signal was converted into analogue to be transmitted?? Is this true?
Click to expand...

It has nothing at all to do with the cable.

HDMI as a protocol is slightly compromised because it multiplexes many signals (video, audio, and now even Ethernet!) into a single packet stream at a constant clock frequency (that is determined by the video resolution/refresh rate).

The audio jitter issue (that PQLS aims to solve) is caused by piggybacking the audio data on the back of video data. The audio data is treated as a second class citizen effectively which can cause higher than normal jitter. It's not an issue on bitstream audio because that already includes timing information (and is buffered by the decoder). It's only an issue on raw PCM audio - i.e. CD audio which is played back without any buffering and ordinarily does not include any clock timing information because it should be constant. A PQLS equipped transmitter will emit additional clock timing information as "hints" for the receiver equipment. A PQLS equipped receiver can then use those hints to reconstruct the PCM stream in a way that is more accurate to the original clock timing. It is a hack that fixes a design flaw with PCM over HDMI, that's all.

This really comes back to HDMI as a protocol being ill conceived from the start. They really shouldn't have inherited 95% of their specification from DVI...
 
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Source http://www.avforums.com/forums/blogs/welwynnick-64635/627-how-can-hdmi-avoid-jitter.html

The master audio clock is now in the amp, where it should have been all along (which is why I said "Most audio systems screw up digital audio in one way or another"). The timing info from the master clock is needed at the DACs to regenerate the orignal analogue audio, and if the clock can be co-located with the DAC, and connected with a robust timing interface that doesn't allow data to get anywhere near it, the better chance we have of getting accurate timing to the DAC. Of course, the clock itself still has to be good quality and reasonably jitter-free, but simply not having to make the perilous journey from transport to amp is a huge advantage. There were a number of players and amps released by the major manufacturers a few years ago that had i-Link or (similar) Denon-link interfaces, and these were a great success. Unfortunately, HDMI effectively replaced i-link in the last few years, and that great quality was lost.

The key though, was not the physical interface itself (HDMI TMDS, IEEE 1394 or ethernet or whatever) but the protocol that was run on it. I called it the A&M protocol, which comes from the IEC standard, but each manufactuer had his own name for it, like HAT or PQLS eyc. However, there is no reason in principle why those protocols cannot be run on HDMI as well, and HDMI V1.3 section 7.11 introduces Audio Rate Control (ARC). Different manufactuers still call this HATS or PQLS as before, but the important thing is that this allows the amp to control the transport in the same way that i-Link did. I was the first lay-person to highlight this, in July last year, and now its being introduced by Sony and Pioneer in their latest players and amps. If anyone is interested, there's a good read on this thread, and it covers a few other areas too:
Prospect of better audio with HDMI V1.3a? Pay attention audiophiles - could be good!
 
Which is all good stuff, but is independent of the cable itself and makes no difference if you're sending encoded bitstreams to your amp.
 
The Pioneer link - they say it does have an effect for bitstream as well as LPCM but I have read the arguement that it doesnt

When I turn it on and off on my Pioneer Blu ray it does sound different
Pioneer LX54 to Pioneer LX83. The sound clearly changes however there is no way of knowing what it is doing. since the latest firmware I prefer it with it on>?
Any other owners of this kit on here??

I would still love to demo to a few of you and show all this stuff - I have tried to video but its uselss at the 640 res my fuji cam films at
 
EllisDJ said:
The Pioneer link - they say it does have an effect for bitstream as well as LPCM but I have read the arguement that it doesnt

When I turn it on and off on my Pioneer Blu ray it does sound different
Pioneer LX54 to Pioneer LX83. The sound clearly changes however there is no way of knowing what it is doing. since the latest firmware I prefer it with it on>?
Any other owners of this kit on here??

I would still love to demo to a few of you and show all this stuff - I have tried to video but its uselss at the 640 res my fuji cam films at
Click to expand...

While I did say it wouldn't necessarily involve any processing it actually wouldn't be that surprising if Pioneer did something to affect the sound. It doesn't have to sound better really as long as it sounds different.
Given the problem ARC is meant to solve re jitter it wouldn't affect bitstreamed audio because it's still encoded and has to be handled by the receiver.
 
I'm not getting involved in another of these arguments but I would just like to say...

THERE ARE NO 1's OR 0's

Digital signals are not made of 1's and 0's this is Binary a language developed to make programming computers easier that is all it is. The signals in HDMi cables and all cables exept optical are Voltages of varying levels. Its the transmitter and reciever that determine how to send and read the values.....

I'm out....
 
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