HDMI Brands Don't Matter

adeelarshad82 writes "I'm sure most of us looking for an HDMI cable have been in a situation where a store clerk sidles up, offers to help and points to some of the most expensive HDMI cables — because apparently these are 'superior cables' which we all absolutely need for the best possible home theater experience. Well, as it turns out the claims are, for the vast majority of home theater users, utter rubbish. According to tests ran on five different HDMI cables, ranging in price from less than $5 up to more than $100, HDMI brands really don't matter."

Not Exactly News, But Consider This...

[Petersko]

When you've been suckered into buying hundreds of dollars of cables for your system, and you either see/hear a difference or you were an idiot, you're going to notice a difference. It's good old fashioned self delusion.

Of course then it gets just awesomely ridiculous. [oregondv.com]

I keep asking myself how I can get some of that idiot money.

CAT5 to HDMI

[Coolhand2120]

To prove to my friend that super-shielded uber-expensive HDMI cables are a load of shit, I took a cheap 5 foot HDMI cable, cut it in two, soldered between the two molded connectors 100 feet (x3 cables) of CAT 5 cable. After un-sleeving and splicing what seemed like two dozen conductors I had a mass of unshielded twisted pair with two molded HDMI connectors between them, I ran the 100 foot cable on top of AC power cables, speaker cable, coax, plugged it into my monitor and it worked perfectly. The only reason I'm not still using the cable is because one of the dozen or so solder points broken in the rats nest of splicing and I would get a crazy scrambled screen (or no image), after a few dozen technical taps the splice came apart and I didn't want to take another hour to put it back together - and lets face it, it was ugly. So there it is if anyone is curious, you can run HDMI over CAT 5 for 100 feet without enough attenuation or noise to break the signal.

And someone else mentioned that the length of the cable adds to the delay in the signal. Cable times are measured in nanoseconds, monitor refresh rates are measured in milliseconds. It would be like saying: I dunno if my RAM can handle the speed of my new hard drive. The length of the cable might add a few nanoseconds to your response time, but you cannot see the difference, you are not a robot. Long analog signal cables on the other hand can't run 3 feet without getting signal noise and causing ghosting and all sorts of other weird artifacts. All I can say is thank god all the analog A/V cables are a thing of the past. If I ever have to hear (OR SEE!) a 60hz hum again in my life it will be too soon.

Re:True, for the most part...

[ultranova]

HDMI signals may be digital, so there's none of the subjective analog concerns, but it's also a real-time signal, which makes it susceptible to even small delays in transmission across the cable. This isn't a concern in a sub-20 ft cable, but becomes noticeable in the cheap longer cables.

Really? You notice the lag in a signal whose speed is measured in "percentage of speed of light" (186,282 miles per second) in a 20 feet cable? When the same cable is transferring both sound (speed 1,126 feet/second in air) and picture? Seriously?

Stop whining about cable quality and start gloating about your superhuman - and, frankly, supernatural - nervous system.

Re:Gold a poor conductor, my ass

[fnj]

P.S., shitty slashdot wouldn't render the omega symbol for ohms. The above figures are all nano ohm-meters.