HDMI - does anyone fall these!

oli collett said:
But, as I've pointed out thousands of times before, the principle for analogue cables is exactly the same - provided it's built well enough to do the job it's intended to (carry a signal without messing it up), there is no objective evidence that anyone can tell the difference from one to another. With digital cables it's just much easier to convince people why without having to wade through dozens of pages of pseudoscience and things like 'yeah I definitely know I could tell cos I wouldn't have had confirmation bias and I don't suffer from placebo effect'
Click to expand...

^^^ this really

this sort of snake oil stuff has been present in the hi-fi industry for decades... its just more apparent these days as it is blatantly obvious to anyone technical that a digital signal is just a bunch of 1s and 0s and as soon as anyone starts claiming that a more expensive cable has somehow enhanced the contrast or the colours etc.. you know they're talking ****. The best an expensive cable can hope to do is reduce the number of bit error... but since HDMI is supposed to suffer from less than 1 in 1000 billion its pretty much irrelevant. It certainly has no impact on the colours, contrast etc.. yet reviewers mention things like that when reviewing cables... would be interesting if a hi-fi magazine ever adopted double blind testing and conducted an honest review of the products being tested... might not go down so well with their advertisers.

The stuff with analogue cable was also generally guff and sneered at by electronic engineers for years... especially speaker cable etc...

http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
 
Last edited:
The thing with analogue cables is/was that
poorly designed 'audiophile' amps + cables with deliberately wonky resistance/capacitance/inductance = difference in sound.

What's funny is that the difference was for the worse in terms of messing with the original signal, but because it sounded different, people would think it was better than the regular cables - e.g. their overly peaky amp could be tamed with a badly designed pricey cable that rolled off the highs. Thus 'system matching' was born - xyz amp needs xyz cable which needs xyz speaker. Depressing really.

You really only need to look at the Head-Fi thread where somebody's cat chewed their $$$$ Virtual Dynamics cable and he discovered it was hosepipe and some other horribly soldered guff to see where all the money you spend on these lolcables goes.

It's one of the reasons why I'm an active speaker convert; pro audio is a much less foo-filled world.
 
Somnambulist said:
The thing with analogue cables is/was that
poorly designed 'audiophile' amps + cables with deliberately wonky resistance/capacitance/inductance = difference in sound.

What's funny is that the difference was for the worse in terms of messing with the original signal, but because it sounded different, people would think it was better than the regular cables - e.g. their overly peaky amp could be tamed with a badly designed pricey cable that rolled off the highs. Thus 'system matching' was born - xyz amp needs xyz cable which needs xyz speaker. Depressing really.

You really only need to look at the Head-Fi thread where somebody's cat chewed their $$$$ Virtual Dynamics cable and he discovered it was hosepipe and some other horribly soldered guff to see where all the money you spend on these lolcables goes.

It's one of the reasons why I'm an active speaker convert; pro audio is a much less foo-filled world.
Click to expand...

Haha hadn't heard about the virtual dynamics thing before! (thread here).

'Audiophiles' are such idiots, I would love to see how these guys fare in a double blind test. Some of the terms they use in their reviews are laughable:
"This is an extremely euphonic cable. It has a very warm tone to it so if you're using tubes, I'm not sure it would synergize to well with them."

"My Cobalt Cable Ultimate Power places the vocals a little closer to you, has a bit more detail in the highs, and quicker transients, but it has also been burned in for about a month now. The Power 3 has a much wider soundstange, better imaging, improved depth, fuller tone, better dynamics, and places the center image further back which I find to be more relaxed. One of it's best features is the ability to present all the bass notes very accurately and with acoustic transparency."
Click to expand...
(this is a power cable we're talking about here)
 
Last edited:
Somnambulist said:
The thing with analogue cables is/was that
poorly designed 'audiophile' amps + cables with deliberately wonky resistance/capacitance/inductance = difference in sound.

What's funny is that the difference was for the worse in terms of messing with the original signal, but because it sounded different, people would think it was better than the regular cables - e.g. their overly peaky amp could be tamed with a badly designed pricey cable that rolled off the highs. Thus 'system matching' was born - xyz amp needs xyz cable which needs xyz speaker. Depressing really.

You really only need to look at the Head-Fi thread where somebody's cat chewed their $$$$ Virtual Dynamics cable and he discovered it was hosepipe and some other horribly soldered guff to see where all the money you spend on these lolcables goes.

It's one of the reasons why I'm an active speaker convert; pro audio is a much less foo-filled world.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Another level of irony is added when you consider the equipment the musicians are using. Guitarists absolutely LOVE wonky cables which colour their sound. They'll spend 1000's just on rewiring their guitar with (technically crap) vintage parts, because they colour the sound in a way they consider desirable.

So a lot of these audiophiles are spending 1000's on cables to perfectly reproduce the mess created by a crappy cable in the musicians setup. Obviously this won't apply to a fan of classical music, but most forms of amplified music will at some point use lo-fi cables to attain a particular sound.
 
Oh I thought this forum was full of "sound engineers"...;). .... Or is it just "experts" :p

If cables make no difference, how does the guitarist manage to change the sound with his wonky cables ?
If they did or do, then the sound created is then the sound of that musician, as he wants to be heard, so that is what needs recording and presented to the listener. :)
 
TheVoice said:
Yes they do. Hell, even on here, a website where you'd expect most users to have a reasonable level of common sense and technical knowledge, you get the odd few who are wholly convinced that expensive HDMI etc cables make big differences. They always sound as deluded as each other.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, but their delusion sounds much clearer and crisper when you use the expensive cable. :D

Expensive cables sometimes do make a difference, but it's not a big one. If this £1000 cable is as good as can be, a £10 cable will still give 99% of the quality and a £1 cable will give 90%. It's like the old saw about vinyl sounding better than CD - it can, but not on an equivalent rig. You'd have to spend several thousand pounds on a vinyl setup before it sounded better than a CD on a semi-decent hi-fi. It really isn't worth it.
 
JeditOjanen said:
Expensive cables sometimes do make a difference, but it's not a big one.
Click to expand...
It depends............

The problem is, people extrapolate "I've heard/seen a difference between cables" to mean "all cables can sound different/show clearer pictures".

Esoteric cabling started with vinyl front ends. High-end cartridges deal in the microvolt levels and consequently you are "almost" down in the noise. Cable construction and materials are very important - the signal you are dealing with is tiny and can easily be swamped by noise.

Move forward to analogue TV. There was a reason to pay extra to get a "decent" SCART cable. The construction made a difference to how the higher frequencies were transmitted and it was perfectly possible to buy a cheap cable that was absolute pants and completely destroyed the video & audio signal. Cables with "decent" construction made a difference - often significant over the cheap unshielded patch cords supplied with equipment.

Move forward to CD and the invention of S/PDIF. Due to the way data and the clock are carried, you are totally dependent on the implementations either end of the cable to decide if the cable has any influence on the sound (and, yes it can, due to the way the clock and data are transmitted together). Yes,m it's digital, but cables can have an influence on the sound in some systems.

Now jump another 20 years and the need to transmit digital audio and video together with a variety of different standards. First DVI, then HDMI and the tech bods invent a nice packetised method of transmitting video and audio. The implementation at either end is so much more sophisticated (by the very nature) that you effectively rule out any possibility for the cable to have any direct influence on the sound or video quality (beyond working/not working), yet people still hear & see differences. Why - there is only one answer and that is the expectation that cables can and do sound different. They have been conditioned to it from the above experiences and will often cite these as a reason why "all" cables can sound/look different - applying the principles of why the analogue interconnect can sound different to the digital HDMI interconnect - even when they do not apply.

The real reason is much less palatable - The Placebo Effect, but this not only is an affront to individuals some people just will not accept they can be susceptible to this and will still swear blind the more expensive cable is "improving" the sound. You can suggest this is a Placebo, but it will be totally dismissed as "I heard/saw a difference". The brain is a very peculiar thing!

Snake Oil manufacturers cater for this market - and why not - it's a legitimate market. Some people have too much money and obsessively buy expensive cables for all parts of their hi-fi. Interconnects, speaker cables, power cables, digital cables, HDMI cables, even Ethernet cables are available from "budget" high end to "how much???" high end. I don't have a problem with people buying expensive cables - it is their money - and their value system that is leading them to do it. I also don't have a problem with rationalising why some cables can and do make a difference. I do have a problem with people who will try to apply the principles that makes some cables sound different to all cables, irrespective of what and how they are carrying it.

I will suggest it could be a Placebo, and explain the technical reasons why this is the case. If they accept me with an open mind, no problem - I have even convinced some to retest and they have not heard a difference when they have some background knowledge. If they don't accept my reasoning and dismiss any possibility of there being a Placebo effect going on "because they hear a difference" (like - durrrrrrrrr - what else is a Placebo here!) I will often point out why they are wrong, argue with them and call them fools to their faces. If it makes one person who doesn't fully understand what is going on question the "perceived wisdom" then I have done my job.

Why do I argue - it's in my nature to if I believe I'm right plus I am probably one of a few people who have the knowledge to do so - I have both a high-end Naim setup (xbmc PC/nDAC/XPS/52/2x135s/DBLs), I have a degree in Electronics and I currently work in low-level hardware and software for digital audio/video systems - I have some reasonably relevant background knowledge here ;)
 
jaybee said:
The 20m one is £1432.80. But don't worry, it was £1592.00.
There are lots of threads on this. There is no difference.
Click to expand...


There's an AudioQuest Diamond HDMI cable on the rainforest for $1494 (£925) and it's only 2m. That's just shy of the price of the Russ Andrews 15m cable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom