HDMI leads - is it worth spending...

[BMWBen]

blugnu said:

Stu R said:

It makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. I can't tell the difference between a £15 'amazing' one and a £2 Amazon one, nor did I expect to be able to.
Utter guff to part suckers from their cash, much like high end speaker cable.

Edited by Stu R on Tuesday 4th January 13:49

I can hear the difference with decent speaker cable - certainly replacing the bell wire on mine with half decent copper stuff made a difference. It's an analogue signal, so mentally I can cope with it having an effect.

HDMI cables just carry binary data though, and they either carry it, or they don't. The Amazon basics ones look a good bet, but I've not tried one as my only HDMI source came with a cable.

I use amazon basics. They're fine.

As you would expect.

[Agoogy]

stueys said:

When I was buying my TV on Monday, the guy in Comet was talking about a HDMI lead with fibre optic cable. Is there such a thing? Seeing as I was splicing fibre cable in the telecomms game nearly 20 years ago and I work with kit using fibre every day I thought he was trying it on. It would need an electrical to optical converter each end for a start. I fit these kinds of devices on a daily basis, and I'm not sure it could be small enough to fit in an end connector. Also, if the cable was bent at too tight a radius the signal would degrade significantly. Were they trying to bend me over? I got a £10 lead for connecting between my PS3 and TV and it seems to work fine thanks :-)

weird... he might have meant an HDMI cable for the visual and a digital optical cable for the audio... thats all I can think of... there's not such thing as fibre optic HDMI AFAIK...

[BMWBen]

stueys said:

When I was buying my TV on Monday, the guy in Comet was talking about a HDMI lead with fibre optic cable. Is there such a thing? Seeing as I was splicing fibre cable in the telecomms game nearly 20 years ago and I work with kit using fibre every day I thought he was trying it on. It would need an electrical to optical converter each end for a start. I fit these kinds of devices on a daily basis, and I'm not sure it could be small enough to fit in an end connector. Also, if the cable was bent at too tight a radius the signal would degrade significantly. Were they trying to bend me over? I got a £10 lead for connecting between my PS3 and TV and it seems to work fine thanks :-)

Sounds like he was talking BS. Maybe he actually meant it supported audio return or something?

[ayh20]

Agoogy said:

stueys said:

When I was buying my TV on Monday, the guy in Comet was talking about a HDMI lead with fibre optic cable. Is there such a thing? Seeing as I was splicing fibre cable in the telecomms game nearly 20 years ago and I work with kit using fibre every day I thought he was trying it on. It would need an electrical to optical converter each end for a start. I fit these kinds of devices on a daily basis, and I'm not sure it could be small enough to fit in an end connector. Also, if the cable was bent at too tight a radius the signal would degrade significantly. Were they trying to bend me over? I got a £10 lead for connecting between my PS3 and TV and it seems to work fine thanks :-)

weird... he might have meant an HDMI cable for the visual and a digital optical cable for the audio... thats all I can think of... there's not such thing as fibre optic HDMI AFAIK...

Fibre HDMI cables do exist ... have a look on the website posted earlier ( Here).

As mentioned earlier the cheapest cable in the world will be just as good as the most expensive because this is digital. The caveat here is "if the signal arrives" ... yes this is digital but just like digital TV there is an awful lot of error correction that will occur if the signal is poor. So a short run < 2m and assuming there is no electrostatic interference i doubt if you will notice a difference. Longer runs or noisy environments do require a better quality cable.

Andy

Edited by ayh20 on Wednesday 5th January 09:04

[Agoogy]

bloody 'ell....nice mark up there...

[Road2Ruin]

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Sadly not correct. There is data loss and data coruption because of many factors. The image or sound is still produced because not all of the data is lost, it just doesn't sound or look as good. There was an article in some magazine last year though about HDMI cables and they did a blind test (see what I did there). The visual side of things the was very little difference netween the cable that came free with the item and the expensive £90 cable. Audio however all of the testers did notice a difference in favor of the more expensive cable!

[hughjayteens]

We generally use these - have run 1080P 3D over 15m without any issues at all.

http://ukhdmi.com/hdmi-ivuna/

They have an audio return channel and ethernet despite not being offically 1.4.

[Frankeh]

Not it's not worth it for most uses. Even over 10m I'd still not be spending more than £20.

[Deva Link]

BMWBen said:

stueys said:

When I was buying my TV on Monday, the guy in Comet was talking about a HDMI lead with fibre optic cable. Is there such a thing? Seeing as I was splicing fibre cable in the telecomms game nearly 20 years ago and I work with kit using fibre every day I thought he was trying it on. It would need an electrical to optical converter each end for a start. I fit these kinds of devices on a daily basis, and I'm not sure it could be small enough to fit in an end connector. Also, if the cable was bent at too tight a radius the signal would degrade significantly. Were they trying to bend me over? I got a £10 lead for connecting between my PS3 and TV and it seems to work fine thanks :-)

Sounds like he was talking BS. Maybe he actually meant it supported audio return or something?

There's a combo HDMI and optical audio cable available for X-Box (and maybe it works on PS3 too, I have no idea). Perhaps he was thinking of that.

[robsa]

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Not saying you are wrong but people said that about digital radio. "No interference, it will be much better because it's digital" they said. Now I sit listening to a broken, intermittent signal... at least with normal radio you can still hear it!

[BMWBen]

robsa said:

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Not saying you are wrong but people said that about digital radio. "No interference, it will be much better because it's digital" they said. Now I sit listening to a broken, intermittent signal... at least with normal radio you can still hear it!

That kind of makes the point though... The digital signal isn't getting to you. What people are saying here is, either:

1. The signal gets across the cable without so much interference that the error correction can't take care of it, in which case you won't be able to tell the difference between the two cables.
2. The signal degrades to the point where the error correction is defeated. This is probably more likely to happen on the cheaper cable of the expensive cable as they get longer. However, you then send the cheaper cable back to the shop because it's not fit for purpose (it won't deliver an HDMI signal undamaged over the length of the cable).

[Road2Ruin]

BMWBen said:

robsa said:

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Not saying you are wrong but people said that about digital radio. "No interference, it will be much better because it's digital" they said. Now I sit listening to a broken, intermittent signal... at least with normal radio you can still hear it!

That kind of makes the point though... The digital signal isn't getting to you. What people are saying here is, either:

1. The signal gets across the cable without so much interference that the error correction can't take care of it, in which case you won't be able to tell the difference between the two cables.
2. The signal degrades to the point where the error correction is defeated. This is probably more likely to happen on the cheaper cable of the expensive cable as they get longer. However, you then send the cheaper cable back to the shop because it's not fit for purpose (it won't deliver an HDMI signal undamaged over the length of the cable).

That's not what happens.

A High definition picture is being transmitted at thousands of bits per second. If just one of these bits doesn't get through you don't lose the picture and all that happens is the missing bit is made up and the image presented anyway. If a lot of bits gets lost then the picture gets progresively worse. The problem is how do you know! If the bit rate drops below a certain point the image will not be shown but after that who's to say the source is not just crap. Even HD movies and channels are broadcast at different bit rates and the quality is different. This is the same effect as having a poor HDMI cable (notice I didn't say cheap).

[IforB]

Road2Ruin said:

BMWBen said:

robsa said:

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Not saying you are wrong but people said that about digital radio. "No interference, it will be much better because it's digital" they said. Now I sit listening to a broken, intermittent signal... at least with normal radio you can still hear it!

That kind of makes the point though... The digital signal isn't getting to you. What people are saying here is, either:

1. The signal gets across the cable without so much interference that the error correction can't take care of it, in which case you won't be able to tell the difference between the two cables.
2. The signal degrades to the point where the error correction is defeated. This is probably more likely to happen on the cheaper cable of the expensive cable as they get longer. However, you then send the cheaper cable back to the shop because it's not fit for purpose (it won't deliver an HDMI signal undamaged over the length of the cable).

That's not what happens.

A High definition picture is being transmitted at thousands of bits per second. If just one of these bits doesn't get through you don't lose the picture and all that happens is the missing bit is made up and the image presented anyway. If a lot of bits gets lost then the picture gets progresively worse. The problem is how do you know! If the bit rate drops below a certain point the image will not be shown but after that who's to say the source is not just crap. Even HD movies and channels are broadcast at different bit rates and the quality is different. This is the same effect as having a poor HDMI cable (notice I didn't say cheap).

^^^^This.

[Deva Link]

I suppose it's similar to the pixelating you get on Freeview/

[BMWBen]

Road2Ruin said:

BMWBen said:

robsa said:

Ruttager said:

Its DIGITAL how can there be a diference in quality? The signal either gets there or it doesn't. Buy the cheap ones.

Not saying you are wrong but people said that about digital radio. "No interference, it will be much better because it's digital" they said. Now I sit listening to a broken, intermittent signal... at least with normal radio you can still hear it!

That kind of makes the point though... The digital signal isn't getting to you. What people are saying here is, either:

1. The signal gets across the cable without so much interference that the error correction can't take care of it, in which case you won't be able to tell the difference between the two cables.
2. The signal degrades to the point where the error correction is defeated. This is probably more likely to happen on the cheaper cable of the expensive cable as they get longer. However, you then send the cheaper cable back to the shop because it's not fit for purpose (it won't deliver an HDMI signal undamaged over the length of the cable).

That's not what happens.

A High definition picture is being transmitted at thousands of bits per second. If just one of these bits doesn't get through you don't lose the picture and all that happens is the missing bit is made up and the image presented anyway. If a lot of bits gets lost then the picture gets progresively worse. The problem is how do you know! If the bit rate drops below a certain point the image will not be shown but after that who's to say the source is not just crap. Even HD movies and channels are broadcast at different bit rates and the quality is different. This is the same effect as having a poor HDMI cable (notice I didn't say cheap).

Well yes, the TV will probably have a load of filters in it that will fudge over any missing pixels in a frame. Your only assurance the the cable will be able to deliver all the information from one end to the other is that on nn the back of the box that the it came in it will say what bandwidth it supports over its length. You have no idea if it's a lie or not.

On the other hand, a cable manufacturer that tells you that you have to buy their £200 cable or your picture won't be as good, and that the gold connectors will add to your viewing pleasure is DEFINITELY lying.

So your choice is, the one which might be lying, or the one which is definitely lying...
You decide!

[BMWBen]

Deva Link said:

I suppose it's similar to the pixelating you get on Freeview/

Not exactly - freeview is MPEG2 which is a compression algorithm designed to handle data loss. The more information that is lost, the progressively worse the picture becomes, but the format the data is transmitted in is taking care of it. On HDMI there is no build in error correction and the information is literally, 24bits per pixel on the screen IIRC, so the error correction will come from the TV doing its "image improvement" thing.

[davepoth]

But the upshot if it is, if the picture arrives on a £3 cable, then a £100 cable won't make a difference?

[Fatman2]

I really don't know about digital cables (logic says it's bks) but if my freebie works fine then I couldn't really care less if spending £50 is going to result in some infinitessimally small gain in picture quality.

As with speaker cables I gave up worrying about it years ago and feel much better for it. Sadly when you go down the route of cabling you end up missing the very thing they're supposed to enhance.

[hughjayteens]

I know a chap who had his £300 HDMI lead sent away and cryogenically treated - he swore blind the picture quality was greatly improved on his 4 year old B&O plasma.....

Hats off to the cryogenic salesman - wonder if he wants a job!

[blugnu]

hughjayteens said:

I know a chap who had his £300 HDMI lead sent away and cryogenically treated - he swore blind the picture quality was greatly improved on his 4 year old B&O plasma.....

Hats off to the cryogenic salesman - wonder if he wants a job!

I'd imagine it's be cheaper, and provide more noticeable improvement, if he paid someone to come in once a week and clean the tv screen :-)

EDIT - actually it's not that expensive. You can even have your CDs cryogenically treated because it makes them sound better. Apparently.

Edited by blugnu on Thursday 6th January 10:29