Why all HDMI cables are the same

One advantage of more expensive cables is that they look nicer and feel a bit more solid. But fortunately, Amazon ruined that industry with their "Amazon Basics" line. Those are some of the best cables I've ever seen, they come in easy-to-open packaging, and they're dirt cheap. A two meter HDMI cable is $7, and it's nicer than any other HDMI cable I've seen.<p>I feel sorry for people that go to stores to buy things. What a waste of time and money.

After 4 years and helping 100s of people with their PS3's loosing signal[1], I cannot agree with the article.<p>I understand the <i>message</i> of the article (that the $90 Monster cables are a scam) but the $1 skinny HDMI cable you got with your DVD player is not the same quality as the $10 one you picked up from MonoPrice, Amazon or Blue Jeans Cables (all 3 of my favorites for buying cables).<p>I don't know why, I am not an EE guy, I'm just saying after telling someone for the 200th time "Try this $10 cable from Amazon instead..." and having them come back with "It worked! The PS3 is fixed!", I'll just say all my personal experience suggests otherwise.<p>I am talking about fixing everything from "my colors look wrong" to "I have no picture!" with this recommendation.<p>I'd also point out that even at the ridiculously high end of cables where you are talking about gold-this and gold-that, to an average viewer there is no perceptible difference but there does seem to be a measurable difference in cable quality for really demanding runs[2], meaning YES there is a difference, but most people will never need/see/experience it unless you are doing a very long run.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/ps3-hdmi-black-screen/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/ps3-hdmi-black-screen/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/hdmi-cable-showdown-monster-monoprice-xtreme-hd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/hdmi-cable-showdown-monster-mono...</a>

I don't feel very confident about the article after reading the following: "Before sending the signal out via the HDMI output, the 1s and 0s are rearranged to minimize how many transitions there are. So instead of 10101010, the transmission may look like 11110000. If you really like math, how it does this is cool [wikipedia link to 8b/10b encoding] ..."<p>It's the other way around, the encoding makes sure there is a bit transition every now and then (details in wiki article); this is done in order to preserve the clock in the signal.<p>When someone writes an article on such a technical subject and messes up a technicality it makes me wonder whether there are more serious factual errors in there.<p>I agree with his point though, my $10 HDMI cable works perfectly :)

For people who don't "get it", I ask them if they think a Monster Ethernet cable would make the colors of the websites they view more crisp and vibrant. If they say yes, don't even bother.

The are a couple of very helpful articles on the Blue Jeans cables sitee about what is wrong with HDMI.<p>"HDMI is a horrid format; it was badly thought out and badly designed, and the failures of its design are so apparent that they could have been addressed and resolved with very little fuss. Why they weren't, exactly, is really anyone's guess, but the key has to be that the standard was not intended to provide a benefit to the consumer, but to such content providers as movie studios and the like. It would have been in the consumer's best interests to develop a standard that was robust and reliable over distance, that could be switched, amplified, and distributed economically, and that connects securely to devices; but the consumer's interests were, sadly, not really a priority for the developers of the HDMI standard."<p>HDMI Cable: An Overview: <a href="http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm</a><p>What's the Matter with HDMI?: <a href="http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/whats-the-matter-with-hdmi.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/whats-the-matter-with...</a><p>I don't have any HDMI based devices fortunately, but on the basis of these two articles a Blue Jeans cable might be a good option to go for as opposed to the cheapest possible.

Audioholics took on this issue with a bunch of bench testing back in 2008: <a href="http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/long-hdmi-cable-bench-tests" rel="nofollow">http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/long-hdmi-cable-...</a><p>BTW, even though the site was using equipment from Monster, don't take that as an indication that they're in Monster's pocket: <a href="http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/monster-cable-sue" rel="nofollow">http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/monster-cable-...</a> (there are any number of articles ripping on Monster on both audioholics.com and avrant.com)

Are there any vendor rebuttals to these claims? I suppose if you're spending $30k for Wilson Watt Puppy's, then $2.5k is chump change (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connection/dp/B003CT2A6I/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connect...</a>). Otherwise, I don't see how they could sneak this into consumer shopping carts.

I thought this was common knowledge now.

Except for the cables that are so cheap that they just don't work. :(

This headline (by the author or editor) is completely misrepresenting the article.<p>HDMI cables are different. Badly made ones, and ones rated differently, can fail in unpredictable ways. The article describes failure modes, and alludes to but brushes over technical differences.<p>Coincidentally, I personally spent 16+ hours on the better part of this past Thursday and Friday nights trying to get a Cablevision set top box (OptimumTV) to cooperate with an Onkyo receiver over HDMI.<p>I'd been using the receiver with a variety of equipment, and with a long run to a wall mounted TV, for several years. I swapped in a new TV, and added the set top box, and suddenly all HDMI related functions of the receiver started failing randomly, 90% of the time.<p>I eventually attributed this to HDMI negotiation between receiver and Cablevision's box. With STB plugged in, Boxee and DVD player would fail too. Without STB, the others would work.<p>With eight cables I had on hand, all "known good", the receiver HDMI indicator would either fail to light, with no picture and no sound on the TV, or blink rapidly, and the picture and sound would come and go rapidly. (To me, this suggests a flawed implementation of HDCP by the Optimium box, likely failing the receiver handshake as it acts as a repeater between STB and the TV, and this Onkyo has a hardware upscaler. An HDCP cable failure is alluded to in the CNET article, but all eight types I had on hand failed in the same way.)<p>Cable brands that failed: Monoprice, Amazon Essentials, Radio Shack, Firedog (Best Buy), and Monster. Also, these were all cables purchased before 2010.<p>I was not in the mood to buy a new receiver just to work with Cablevision's box, so I decided to try the Home Depot "installer" aisle, and selected "GE Ultra Pro HDMI with Ethernet" in a two pack of 6' lengths, and a 15' foot "in wall" installer kit as well.<p><a href="http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202742223/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&#38;storeId=10051&#38;catalogId=10053" rel="nofollow">http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202742223/h_d2/Produ...</a><p>These are labeled as supporting audio return channel, 3D, and Ethernet, and are rated for 4K video (not mentioned in the linked article). The Cablevision OptimumTV set top box does not use any of these features.<p>When I used this new HDMI cable, the whole system worked flawlessly. Dumbfounded, I repeatedly swapped in my other cables, but they all failed, while these worked. I had both a 15' and two 6' ones from this brand, and all three worked.<p>So no, not all HDMI cables are the same. I cannot attribute this particular behavior to "bad cables" or even "cheap cables", it has to be some feature of the cable design.<p><i>// Disclaimer: I dislike cable TV for its "bundling" practices, and hope Google wins their custom Hulu bid to force the studios to keep content online for non cable subscribers longer. I was doing this install for someone else.</i>

Never ceases to amaze me how the cheapest HDMI cable in any brick and mortar store I've ever seen is $30. You'd think if people found out that a store would sell them for just $10-15 that people would flock there due to the relatively cheap price.<p>$4 with 2 day shipping off of Amazon and (of course) it works perfectly.

One thing I don't understand, which the article just mentions in passing...<p>What is the difference between "high-speed" HDMI cables and standard cables? Are high-speed cables worth the extra money?

Not all cables are the same, even in the digital domain. Cheap metals, shielding, high resistance wire and stray capacitance can change the shape of the signal, increase noise and increase losses.<p>What goes in doesn't always come out the same and cheap shitty poorly filtered equipment on each end makes it worse (PS3, Vaios, low-end Bravias etc - yes I'm complaining about Sony here).<p>However the problems go away immediately at the $10 price point.<p>I'd only buy an expensive cable if I was going to require extra mechanical strength i.e. if it was being plugged and unplugged regularly, much as you should always buy decent oscilloscope probes.<p>On a side-note, as an ex-EE I've seen some crazy shit going on with cables before. The worst being a $1500 RF cable that ran 4 inches between two bits of avionic equipment and carried 455KHz IF (nothing particularly sensitive or reliable that a $15 cable would have sufficed).

You buy a cable. There 'would' be rusting. There 'would' be oxidation of conductor.<p>$5 cable would be that way in 20-40 weeks.<p>$50 would be there in longer, because the conductor (of the connector specifically ) is different. Gold plated ones last longer, also the quality of the gold plating matters.<p>They don't matter when they are new.