TV\Audio cables...

[2Loose]

I need another HDMI cable - simple, 1 metre of wire with a connector at each to carry a digital signal. Nothing complex but a shop wanted £40!!

'We only carry high quality cables sir' - do people really fall for this? Digital means that the signal either gets there or it doesn't. Nothing in between like hifi cables or old tv ariel cables. A cheap cable will give exactly the same picture\audio as one made out of solid platinum which has been hand twined by 40year old virgins.

Anyway, I found this web site which does take a tongue in cheek approach to the topic.

 

[ohnovino]

HDMI carries a digital signal (i.e. made up of 1s and 0s).

A cheap cable will carry the 0s without any problems. But the 1s are narrower, and so can leak out through microscopic cracks in the cabling. If you don't spend the extra money on a quality lead then you'll find your HD pictures end up looking "zero-heavy".

 

[cisamcgu]

But surely, if the cable runs downhill, then the 1's will have no time to fall through the cracks. I have my DVD player above my TV for this very reason, thereby allowing me to save over 45p on the cost of the cable !

See below for picture !

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

I always just use ebay HDMI cables for around a couple of quid. I have never had any problems with any of them. One of the reasons I stopped reading What Hi-Fi years ago was the stupid tests that they carried out on extremley expensive digital HDMI cables and stating that you could tell a difference.

 

[ohnovino]

But surely, if the cable runs downhill, then the 1's will have no time to fall through the cracks. I have my DVD player above my TV for this very reason, thereby allowing me to save over 45p on the cost of the cable !

The problem with having a downhill cable is that the 0s roll better than the 1s, and so will arrive at the TV at too high a speed. It's best to have your cable in a U-shape to slow them down a bit.

 

[Fnaar]

I just connect everything up with string. Saves a fortune, and it's much quieter round here since I started doing it.

 

[ColinJ]

I had a conversation on this subject with the MD of a company that manufactured audio equipment used by the largest TV and radio broadcasting companies in the world including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, ABC, NBC etc. He knew what kind of wiring went inside the products his company manufactured.

In the old analogue systems, the audio signals had probably gone down many tens of metres of his cabling before it ever got near the outside world. Did they use cables that cost £100/metre? Er, no! He laughed out loud when we discussed the prices that some people were willing to pay for audio cables. He reckoned he'd have made more money selling the cables than the equipment that such cables connect to!

If cheaper cables seriously degrade the quality of the audio signal then it would have already been seriously degraded before it ever reached the audiophile's £100/metre cables!

Now that everything is going digital, it's even less of a problem. As long as a '1' signal is near enough to the nominal '1' and the '0' is near enough to the nominal '0', that's good enough.

(I'm not saying that poor quality cables are ok - they aren't, but decent quality doesn't cost a fortune.)

 

[Bman]

On boxing day I went with a friend to Dixons to pick up a TV and Blueray player he had reserved.

Then he remembered he needed a HDMI cable, the salesman gets one, rings it up and says "That'll be another £89.99 sir"

We both looked at each other in shock then back at the salesman to see if he was serious. He was.... I then went to find the cheapest cable I could find. £19.99. Better, but not as cheap as the HDMI cable I bought online two weeks beforehand.

So, I hand the cheaper cable to my friend and the salesman starts trying to suggest that the 89.99 cable is "better" and that my friend "needs" it to get the best results from his purchases.

Remind me never to shop in Dixons again. What they are doing should be illegal.

 

[2Loose]

On boxing day I went with a friend to Dixons to pick up a TV and Blueray player he had reserved.

Then he remembered he needed a HDMI cable, the salesman gets one, rings it up and says "That'll be another £89.99 sir"

...

That'll be the 'special' cable with right angled connectors then <seriously> - the £40 quid was for a straight cable but they wanted another £50 for a right angled one!

The mind boggles. I got a used pre-owned one from Gamestation for 4.99 instead.

 

[redjedi]

You'd be surprised at how gullible/trusting consumers can be.

I tested this theory while working in an audio shop by selling nothing but green cables the whole day, just be saying they either sounded better or was the "in" colour to have at that time.


There's also certain cable manufacturers that put arrows on the cables to indicate which way the signal must flow

 

[Alien8]

The problem with having a downhill cable is that the 0s roll better than the 1s, and so will arrive at the TV at too high a speed. It's best to have your cable in a U-shape to slow them down a bit.

There's nothing worse than a bad case of the 1s.

 

[Proto]

[color="663300"]Gold-plated HDMI cable uses magnesium diboride conductors and has a carbon fibre sheath for maximum strength and water resistance up to 300 fathoms. Ideal for underwater filming. In dry weather, keep cable moist to avoid cracking.[/color]

Gold-plated HDMI cable 100m long.

Voted "cable of the year" by "What HD Screen" magazine readers.

Ideal for High Definition TV. Most people don't realise that the "digital" data is carried by an analogue signal. As there is no error correction in HDMI you can get degradation in colour quality, which may appear as digital noise on screen. In the worst case, the HDCP threshold decision margin can fail totally, with resultant loss of picture. This happens only with a long cable length or a poor connection but it's more common than you might expect. For a cheap cable, "long" might be only a few meters.

In contrast, our unique HDMI cable is almost totally lossless as it uses a superconductor material called magnesium diboride which exhibits zero resistance at 39 degrees. Consequently, transmitting high quality digital signals over a 100 metre length is no problem at all. In addition, it's plated with 78 carat berillium-gold to give minimum "skin-effect" resistance at high frequencies, thus minimising degradation of the square-wave leading edges and ensuring accurate threshold decision for every digital bit transmitted.
Order HDMI0362-100m at £599.95

Qty

 

[benb]

It's the new alchemy.

Cheap cables might break quicker (if you unplug the equipment a lot), but as long as the connector is secure you'll have no problem with a £5 cable. I've got one that's 8m long, and it cost about £10 with no issues.

"Most people don't realise that the "digital" data is carried by an analogue signal"
WTF? Utter bollocks.

 

[asterix]

Interesting (my HDMI cable is cheapo stuff from a supermarket) but what about speaker cable?

 

[Fnaar]

A friend of mine used to spend hundreds of quid on cables for his hifi... didn't stop him listening to sh!te music, though!