The truth about HDMI cable

http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-rip1/

I had a RM30 HDMI cable that just wont let my BD-player talk to the rest of the AV system.

Replaced it with a RM150-odd AudioQuest cable, problem solved.
RM30 down the drain for nothing.

Recently, needed another HDMI cable for a Media player, went for the lowest entry MonsterCable model. Everything worked as expected.

As in most things in this world, you gets what you pays for, within sane-limits of course.

Forgive me for saying again. This kind of article always happens when a not too technical person, or a not really I/T savvy person begins to behave as an 'authority' on I/T related stuff. And with the permeation of I/T technology into hifi and A/V, this has become the norm lately.

The arguement ALWAYS goes "digital signal is a string of 1's and 0's and therefore everything under the sun is PERFECT". Shades of the redbook CD promises of decades ago. It is worthwhile to go read up or check up a bit. Are digital signals really sent as a series of perfectly discrete and concrete 1's and 0's. Just HOW are digital signals sent in a digital cable like the HDMI ? Is PERFECT FOREVER really that simple ? The key word is 'REPRESENT'.

Do take good heed of mugenfoo's experience !

Hi,
Mugen's case maybe cause by a defective cable with poor or no quality control - either the connector itself is defective or loose/broken connection with the wires inside, etc. The proper QCed stock cable that is provided with the bluray player(if one is included) which cost less than RM30 would have worked well enough.

But even so-called digital cables will still be influenced by the same factors as our normal cables. So called 'digital 1s and 0s' are still carried as actual voltages inside the cable. Only advantage is we only deal with two voltage, 0V for digital-0 or (depending on the standard) 1V for e.g. for digital-1. However, anyone who has used a digital voltmeter will know that the actual voltage in real life, especially if we get into higher accuracies like 1 or 2 decimal places, are not extremely stable. So 1V will usually oscillate around say 0.95 to maybe 1.05V. It is still OK because usually we set a threshold for the voltage representing digital 1 (e.g. 0.5V for a 0-1V range, anything below 0.5V is 0 and anything above is digital-1). If it is a 0-1V range, it is highly unlikely any cable will cause an ~1V signal to drop to below 0.5V. Still there are chances of inteferences, etc. Plus check the specifications for HDMI and we can see that especially for longer runs and for more current specifications (like HDMI V1.3 and esp V1.4), the specifications spells out the tolerances for standard electrical parameters of the cable like impedence, inductance, etc. So all of these parameters WILL have an effect on the supposedly perfect 0s and 1s. It may not really be necessary to get one of those insanely priced premium multi-thousand ringgit HDMI cables from some exotic manufacturer. But it is probably worthwhile to get a good quality one. I too agree that in theory, the standard RM30 HDMI cable should work well if it has no faults. But I also agree with MF's experience that there are potentially gains from better cable constructions and materials. This is the same arguement as we have been seeing in the industry with regards to, for e.g. lamp-flex versus proper speaker cables, or interconnects and so forth. Lamp flex will measure within the standard tolerances for speaker cable usage but I think many here will agree that a good quality specialized speaker cables do sound better. But why ? Sometimes, our science just do not have the answer.

I remember this guy here who championed the RM 26 cable from Carrefour.