HDMI cable
- Thread starter Jimmy1983
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They're all the same.
You could pay £100 plus. My mate paid £40 for his because he listened to the bull spouted by the youth in D*x*n*. I paid £19.50 for my first one and £6 for my next one, both gold plated but no difference in quality. These are not hi-fi speaker cables which do vary massively in quality. What I wanted were a really short leads to cut down on the jumble behind my Onkyo Blue-Ray home cinema set up. There was no difference in picture or sound quality between the long and short leads. HDMI is a digital standard, an HDMI lead has to be that standard otherwise it isn't HDMI. What you will possibly get with more expensive leads is pretty colours and tougher shielding but no better signal. Search Google or go to AV Forums, there's loads about the quality of leads
Soldato
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If you've spent thousands on your AV setup then maybe the supposed lower errors and therefore error correction are worth the extra cost but I for one don't believe a word of it and use the cheapest cables I can find.
Yeh, my parents were tricked into buying a 100 quid cable from a certain electronics brand. I bought mine for 30 quid and theres no noticable difference in quality, if any. I dunno about cables for 3.50 though 
but I'm pretty sure their all the same, besides the gold plating.
but I'm pretty sure their all the same, besides the gold plating.
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Some of you lot don't read the rules do you 
Mentioning or even disguising competitors names isn't on you know.
Sometimes the cheapest isn't always the best. Ok I balk at paying mega £££'s for paying for a cable make like Monster from a high street shop, but I like to pay a bit more if it has better quality connectors & is better shielded against electromagnetic interference, especially if the cable required needs to be a longer length (10m like it is in my setup)
Mentioning or even disguising competitors names isn't on you know.Sometimes the cheapest isn't always the best. Ok I balk at paying mega £££'s for paying for a cable make like Monster from a high street shop, but I like to pay a bit more if it has better quality connectors & is better shielded against electromagnetic interference, especially if the cable required needs to be a longer length (10m like it is in my setup)
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to be honest, there isn't much difference between my 70quid Pure and the 5quid Phillips that I have.
(apart from braiding, gold plating, special cable sheathing etc... lol)
My thoughts were upon buying the Pure, well I have a very expensive TV and a expensive games console... now, the only thing connecting them together is one lead. why should I skimp on that!?
(apart from braiding, gold plating, special cable sheathing etc... lol)
My thoughts were upon buying the Pure, well I have a very expensive TV and a expensive games console... now, the only thing connecting them together is one lead. why should I skimp on that!?
Some of you lot don't read the rules do you
Edited my post
And no, I didn't read the rules 
no difference between low or high cost cables. I'm using a sub £10 from large chainstore with same name as a razor & it works fine.
I really can't stant it at work when the managers talk to customers about how the more expensive cables have less oxygen in the cable and will prodice a better image, and they have less faults in the cable.
It's a digital cable, it either works or it doesn't.
The bad days of having to buy an expensive cable to get it to work are over as everything is now digital and it makes no difference, with analog there is a difference.
I really can't stant it at work when the managers talk to customers about how the more expensive cables have less oxygen in the cable and will prodice a better image, and they have less faults in the cable.
It's a digital cable, it either works or it doesn't.
The bad days of having to buy an expensive cable to get it to work are over as everything is now digital and it makes no difference, with analog there is a difference.
Soldato
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HAHAHA I had to ask the wife as I didn't have a clue who this was!
It's the same as any other cable digital signal cable in my book.
I dont get the cheapest I can find, but I get a slight better one simply as they last a fair bit longer. I'm paying less than £10 for 1 and 1.5m cables.
Expensive cables were invented to take advantage of uneducated buyers who were purchasing new technology, and its made some people a hell of a lot of profit.
At the end of the day, HDMI is digital, which is on or off, so as long as there is a connection it doesnt need uber high quality connectiors and sheithing. Analogue is a whole different story though.
At the end of the day, HDMI is digital, which is on or off, so as long as there is a connection it doesnt need uber high quality connectiors and sheithing. Analogue is a whole different story though.
Soldato
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I had a cheap cable and got lots of lip sink problems on my upscaler. Got a £20 cable no more lip sink errors.
As an engineering student who worked in the AV industry for 3 years proir to uni, i'd like to clear things up.
Profit bit is true, some of the higher end cables have up to 700% (yes two zeros!) margin
i.e cable bought for £10 from supplier, is sold at about £100, so after taxes the company makes ~70. note this was the worst case i found most are much less than this. Cables+Tables are the only place AV stores actually make real money. TVs and the like usually have less than 10% return."digital is on or off" WRONG!!!!
that concept is a massive simplification
*****DIGITAL IS NOT 1's AND 0's ******
This is a common misconception. We live in an analogue world where you can have a virtually infinitely small increase in anything. The concept of 1’s and 0’s is a simplification, for ease of design, calculation and engineering processes.
In reality, these 0’s and 1’s are simply arbitrary analogue voltage levels within a system. A ‘0’ is not 0Volts or else the system would actually be turned off, incredibly inefficient and slow.
As an example take a ‘digital’ signal, where the transmitted ‘0’s are 1V, and ‘1’s are 9V.
As these are ANALOUGE voltages they are prone to not only transmission interference, due to propagation and attenuation through the cable, but also to EMF interference from nearby cables/electrics etc, as with ANY OTHER CABLE. (Ever tried putting a decent oscilloscope near a mains cable? – you’ll get a AC voltage field of about 1V all around it, this induces new/changes existing voltages in nearby connectors i.e. your HDMI cable)
So on the receiving end there is always some tolerance (say anything below 2.5V = ‘0’ & anything over 7.5V = ‘1’. Any value that has suffered more interference (i.e. 2.5000001V-7.49999999V) is then sent for data correction, which is an arbitrary logic process designed by the manufacturer (BRAVIA engine™, Live Colour Creation™ etc.), these are basically combinations of seeing what the rest of the signal looks like before and after the corrupt bit, or in the immediate surrounding area of the picture (e.g. colour shade), or if in complete doubt, just making it up... yes I did say that – statistically some (if only a very, very small percentage) of your picture must be made from pure guesswork by your kit.
The reason you get certain cables with ‘better blacks’ etc is the differences in the shielding technology and implementation, which resulst in a purer signal reaching the destination.
So if that hasn't confused you, in short:
A digital signal is in-fact made from analogue values! And hence is just as prone to corruption as an analogue cable. The more shielding, the better the conductors (silver is best) and the purer the copper inside (more 9’s after the 99.%), the better your cable and hence signal will be.
So getting a higher grade cable WILL improve the signal your AV system receives.
However whether you can see the difference is down to both the viewer and more crittically the kit. Cheap kit = worse picture, no matter what cables you use.
Good cables can’t make your kit any better, but BAD CABLES MAKE IT MUCH MUCH WORSE.
The rule of thumb i found to be justified was approximately 5-10% of anything you bought. e.g TV+HT+DVD/BD+SKY package at 1k, £100 of cables for the whole lot was about right
For a 1m cable running through the average tangle of wires behind a tv, £20-40 at retail is about right, anything less and those who know what they're looking for would probably start to notice, anthing more is usually overkill.
On a different matter, Optical cables are essentially the same principal, although they don’t suffer from EMF interference. But the higher grade the glass/polymer, and the better the reflective jackets inside, the less attenuation will occur so less recovery of data is required.
Oh and if you ever have a sales person (in my case it was a ‘regional manager’ in a Panasonic store!) tell you about ‘gold plated’ optical leads, just walk out, don’t dignify him (or her) with the sale. Its a light pulse, gold plating would make the cable worse...fool.
/rant
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this increases with distance, hence the requirement for better cabling.
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Hi vertica,
Are you sure that the TVs carry out such error correction on an HDMI input? I would be surprised if this were the case, and so would be interested in any links or references you've got.
I'm not convinced about the 'better blacks' claim I'm afraid. Any half-decent in-spec cable should get the signal through over normal distances with negligible errors. If the HDMI link was sufficiently broken to be working right 'at the limit' because of excessive length or interference (i.e. at the cliff edge for digital transmission) then surely you'd see and hear more artefacts than just poor black levels.
I'm not saying that better cable shielding etc. can't make a difference, just that for 99.something percent of applications there won't be a difference in the picture.