The Rip

@EvilDave
Actually, on HDMI, you’re not really right. Yes a few signals such as hot plug are logic 1 or 0, but other signals (the ones that actually carry the video and audio data) are Low Voltage Differential Signals (LVD). The tolerances are even better than what you’re talking about. Two wires are used for each signal. A logic 1 is when one wire is a higher voltage than the other wire. A logic zero is when that same wire goes to a lower voltage than the other. Look at the diagram and you’ll see each TDMS signal has a + and – (and a ground too just to be nice) So as RF energy enters the cable (since it really doesn’t have to be all that shielded) it may inject a spike of 5V on the cable. So if it was 1 (on the + signal) and -1 V (on the negative signal) before the spike hit, since both cables are next to each other, they will both absorb the same spike and go to 6 and 4 V. One wire (the same wire) is still a higher voltage than the other and the data isn’t lost.
That’s the magic of LVD (and the voltage levels don’t have to swing as much as they do in TTL logic so the transition times are faster.
LVD is what makes USB possible over such crappy cheap cables.

Not entirely true. Digital signals such as the signal from your Blu-Ray player do degrade via artifacting, things get blocky.

That being said, you will see no difference in cable until you reach somewhere around 35 feet. Then you will want to start spending more than the cheapest you can find. And no point should you need Monster cable however.

Some of this is a bit misleading. With 3d TV’s just coming out, manufacturers of receivers have agreed to manufacture HDMI 1.4 capability into all their devices to support 120 HZ, 1080p 3D images. Sometimes the cheap cable is just fine. Sometimes it actually has a purpose, not that there isn’t huge markup on many of these products.

Cables still matter, especially with the new 3D stuff out there. In order to get 3D, you need an HDMI 1.4 cable that transmits at least 10Gbps. Plus, more expensive cables have a lifetime warranty. That $10 cable you buy will break in two years. Multiply that by 15 years (the average life of both LCD and plasma), there’s $75.

@David, that’s not quite correct. 0 and 1s are just assigned to voltage levels. so a voltage level from 0v to maybe 0.8v maybe considered 0s and another higher voltage level maybe 1.8v and upwards to whatever limit would be assigned 1s.

This is only from my memory when I studied engineering a long time ago.

But if research shows that there is no perceptible gain in signal level then it just a waste of money and the stores are just milking it

The sad thing is, the myth of expensive HDMI cables has been outed for a while, yet I still see displays showing on side of the TV screen using “inferior” cables and one side using “” cables.

Every time I go to the local electronics store, I get sick when I hear the sales person pushing HDMI cables. I’m always tempted to tell them to go to a local store that has them for $10.

Does anyone know where I can buy a gold-plated, shielded, gas-injected USB cable? SATA cable? I couldn’t find any searching the InterWeb.

This article is wrong in so many ways. The underlying premise is of course correct: There are many expensive cables in the marketplace which is no better, or even worse, than cheap ones.

However, a digital signal can become degraded as well! Have you seriously never seen that? It’s quite common with broken avi files or digital TV signals. The picture gets blocky or broken. That’s a problem with HDMI as soon as you reach non trivial distances (over a couple of meters, perhaps around ten). Good EM/RF shielding which this article calls a scam is actually very important.

Just as the article compares HDMI with computer data cables, think of it as a network cable rather than a hard disk cable. Very few people has had problems with a hard disk cable since they are factory made of strict specifications and a standardized length. Broken network cables can cause a lot of weird errors, broken frames, re-transmissions and bad performance. Go over a certain length and you need very good (shielded) cables. Much like with HDMI.

@Russel
“You might as well compare a Louis Vuitton and with Sears handbag. Of course they both accomplish the same thing, but some people want status and so what?”

I have a Monster Cable coming out of my Louis Vuitton pants. I’m not a douche nozzle, but I give a really nice signal to the ladies.

Two things:

First: Bandwidth is key when it comes to digital cabling, a fact rarely mentioned by people like the ones who write these types of articles, and usually because they just aren’t knowledgeable enough on the topics they discuss. If you are, in fact, going to be slamming the retailers for “duping” their customers with misinformation, I suggest you do the same and not “dupe” your readers in the same way. Saying that all cables are the same is just as wrong as the things you’re attacking. A 10.2gb cable is NOT the same as a 6gb cable.

Second: Most people WANT and NEED the reassurance of premium cost items, regardless of the intricacy of the product precisely because it’s one less thing on their plate. Most people who purchase premium do so because they can afford it, and chances are that if they can, they likely have a high-paying, high-responsibility profession in which they need to worry about much more important things than the innards of a cable. They just want something that works, no matter the cost, and can’t be bothered to read up on them like the rest of us.

The statement “With an HDMI signal being a string of 1′s and 0′s, it either works perfectly or not at all” is incorrect. Just because it is digital does not mean there could be cable related signal loss. If the signal was being transmitted via a TCP related protocol, where every packet was “verified” on the receiving end, then this statement would be correct. The HDMI signal is analogous to UDP transmissions where there is no verification on the receiving end; therefore a cable that allows interference or loss would ultimately affect the signal quality.

Monster sucks, I couldn’t agree more with this article. Glad a well read blog like mint published this and I hope Monster notices and feels ashamed of themselves. They won’t of course.

Now we get to see who’s attorney’s are better paid. Mint’s or Monster’s!

It should be noted that this isn’t completely true. The “quality” (not expense) of the cable will increase the maximum distance you can send data over at a particular rate. For example, cat5 and cat6 are both digital cables with the same pinout, but cat6 will allow you to send gigabit data farther than cat5. This goes for HDMI cables as well. If you’re going 1 meter from your PS3 to your TV, this is a non-issue. If you’re routing video from one floor of your house to another, you may encounter issues if you cable does not of proper quality. Of course, this does not mean in any way that more expensive cables are necessarily better quality.

The article gets some of the fine details wrong, but the thrust is right. Expensive HDMI cables are almost never more useful then the cheap ones.

(1) Digital signals are sensitive to signal degradation from bad cables. The digital signals transit cables in an analog form (voltages) and get decoded. Sometimes very simple forms (+5V is 1, -5V is 0) and with loose tolerances that make it hard to make a mistake (+3V is pretty far from +5V but it is almost definitely a 1 anyway). Smaller voltage swings, tighter timings and such make it harder to tell “1 with bad signal” from a “0 with bad signal”. Many digital transmission schemes layer error detection or even correction over top of this.

That is the theory. In practice it is pretty rare to have even a dirt cheap cable be bad enough to have different results. It can happen though (you can get a bad ethernet cable that will see phantom collisions, I haven’t seen one that gets no phantom collisions but produces bad checksums though, I guess it is possible). This wasn’t from buying dirt cheap cables, it was from having a manufacturing defect on a dirt cheap cable (which is likely a side effect of them being dirt cheap and skimping on the QC).

I personally made my bet on the $10 HDMI cable, if there had been a $3 HDMI cable I probably would have used the $10 one anyway going with the theory that at $10 the cable was likely tested, and at $3 maybe not so much. Even so I would guess the $3 cable has a 99% chance or better of being just as good as the $10 one for any practical purposes…I just don’t want to have to drive back to Fry’s and stand int he return line and that was worth $7 to me.

(2) In the analog world there was more then just science saying the good cables are better then the bad ones. Most folks really could see a difference between composite and S-video cables. Most folks could see a difference between the $1 cables and the $15 cables. Again in practice this isn’t a big deal either because most people could NOT see a difference between the $15 cables and the $100 cables.