Long Run of HDMI

[Gavin Scott]

Doesn't degradation of signal effectively mean no signal with HDMI?

I'm leaning more towards the 2 x 12m + repeater option. Now just need to convince the other half that it'd be a worthwhile investment

I guess it does - ergo, you don't want any degradation.

Go ahead and spend the money and shout things like, "I never complain when you spend all our money on furniture polish or knickers".

Nothing can go wrong.

[Bail]

Off topic but in a similar vain, I irregularly read What Hi-Fi which always features TV and they make a big thing out of the quality of HDMI cables and how it makes a difference to picture and that using the free one supplied with some kit is a big no no.

My understanding was that HDMI is a digital connection and therefor 0's and 1's surely they either get to the end of the cable, or not, the quality of the cable can't make a difference to the resulting image.. can it?

[Alexia]

Off topic but in a similar vain, I irregularly read What Hi-Fi which always features TV and they make a big thing out of the quality of HDMI cables and how it makes a difference to picture and that using the free one supplied with some kit is a big no no.

My understanding was that HDMI is a digital connection and therefor 0's and 1's surely they either get to the end of the cable, or not, the quality of the cable can't make a difference to the resulting image.. can it?

An electrical signal still has to travel along the cable, so therefore the cable's ability to transport those electrons reflects the quality. There's actually 2 categories of cable - Cat 1 (standard) and Cat 2 (High Speed)

Think of it as two cars - you can get from A-B in a Vauxhall Nova and an Aston Martin DB9 - they both do the same job, but the DB9 will produce a better quality ride than the Nova.

[dosxuk]

Off topic but in a similar vain, I irregularly read What Hi-Fi which always features TV and they make a big thing out of the quality of HDMI cables and how it makes a difference to picture and that using the free one supplied with some kit is a big no no.

My understanding was that HDMI is a digital connection and therefor 0's and 1's surely they either get to the end of the cable, or not, the quality of the cable can't make a difference to the resulting image.. can it?

I wouldn't have expected there to be a market in gold plated TosLink cables, but there is. I think many of the people who can see the differences in picture quality between different HDMI cables are the same people who can hear a difference between teflon coated and non-coated speaker cables. Tell people there's a difference, and that you're not qualified to talk about it if you can't see the difference and suddenly you're surrounded by people who see things that aren't there.

[Alexia]

Off topic but in a similar vain, I irregularly read What Hi-Fi which always features TV and they make a big thing out of the quality of HDMI cables and how it makes a difference to picture and that using the free one supplied with some kit is a big no no.

My understanding was that HDMI is a digital connection and therefor 0's and 1's surely they either get to the end of the cable, or not, the quality of the cable can't make a difference to the resulting image.. can it?

I wouldn't have expected there to be a market in gold plated TosLink cables, but there is. I think many of the people who can see the differences in picture quality between different HDMI cables are the same people who can hear a difference between teflon coated and non-coated speaker cables. Tell people there's a difference, and that you're not qualified to talk about it if you can't see the difference and suddenly you're surrounded by people who see things that aren't there.

It's psychological. I prefer to buy the £19.99 sound audio cables rather than the £2.99 Tesco Value ones.

[Bail]

Off topic but in a similar vain, I irregularly read What Hi-Fi which always features TV and they make a big thing out of the quality of HDMI cables and how it makes a difference to picture and that using the free one supplied with some kit is a big no no.

My understanding was that HDMI is a digital connection and therefor 0's and 1's surely they either get to the end of the cable, or not, the quality of the cable can't make a difference to the resulting image.. can it?

An electrical signal still has to travel along the cable, so therefore the cable's ability to transport those electrons reflects the quality. There's actually 2 categories of cable - Cat 1 (standard) and Cat 2 (High Speed)

Think of it as two cars - you can get from A-B in a Vauxhall Nova and an Aston Martin DB9 - they both do the same job, but the DB9 will produce a better quality ride than the Nova.

But thats rubbish surely, my internet travels along copper shitty cables to i get about 2mbps, around the corner has snazzy fiber so they get 50mbs, but the content we both receive is identical?

Now I can sort of see a bandwidth argument in that higher quality cable will give better bandwidth, I know from experience that a cheapo composite cable is for example susceptible to a range of interference but with digital the same interference would just mean I get no picture rather than a fuzzy one, so if I get a picture I'm getting all my data which in theory would be idential to the data initiial sent by the box.

[Bail]

I wouldn't have expected there to be a market in gold plated TosLink cables, but there is.

You know when you put it like that...

Salesman: Did you know GOLD makes light go faster!
Customer: No really? Wow?
Salesman: Yes so you need this £59.99 cable
Customer: Oh...

[dosxuk]

It's psychological. I prefer to buy the £19.99 sound audio cables rather than the £2.99 Tesco Value ones.

But would you stretch to these £75 ones - http://www.mains-cables-r-us.co.uk/ours ... Cable.html

At work even the £2.99 ones are too expensive. We buy these 39p ones to connect the DJ kit together. And that's feeding a 2,500 capacity nightclub. If the cables linking the decks made any difference we'd spend the extra cash, but it really doesn't. The quality of the source material makes far more difference - I can normally tell the difference between a 192kbps encoded file from a 320kbps file, and over compression is easily identified, but spotting the difference between quality of phono leads is impossible.

Incidentally, the reason for buying the cheap ones is that we go through so many of them. They're always being taken away by people (accidentally), dropped and stood on, caught in case lids, getting trapped in door frames and generally getting severed or having the connectors damaged.

What amuses me the most though, is at least part of virtually everything these audiophiles watch or listen to has been through some grotty old piece of cable which was bodged together at the last minute because something broke. Certainly none of the kit used has the ridiculous mains cables they insist are required for optimal audio quality.

[Andrew Wood]

I certainly wouldn't profess to be an expert on it, but one way to think about it would be to consider the error correction being performed.

It's true that it's all digital 0s and 1s, but if the lower-quality cables aren't quite up to the job, how much error correction is being performed by the TV to account for the stray bits and is it noticeable?

[lukey]

Very late to the party, but just noticed this thread.
Though it'd be worth pointing to http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... ry-vs-hdmi

[Pete]

To drag this old one back from the dead, I am currently looking to connect my PC up to my lovely little new bedroom telly (well I say lovely, it's Technika but it's a pleasant little LED £130 thing and aside from a god awful remote I find it quite agreeable).

Anyhow yes, the distance between this (as I'd run it around the back of my bed) is about 8m. I note there are a whole selection of 10m cables on amazon however I have no idea what will be good enough. Exactly what happens if you buy a shit one?