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Is there really a difference in HDMI Cables?

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
I went shopping today locally for some new HDMI cables to convert everything from component/S-Video. The cable prices ranged from 14$ plain basic to 60$ for the gold braided cables, flat and other wise.

The cable that I purchased was 30$ for a gold braided one, when I connected it to my little HTPC via my ATI HD 2400 Pro I couldn't get 5.1 sound out of my receiver, and I just got the receiver.

So Im just curious is the cable really makes the difference.
 
A digital interface is sending 1's and 0's, it doesn't matter how shiny they are :)

Analog cables (for audio equipment and such) can indeed have varying degrees of quality, or so some people believe.

But digital is digital. It either preforms at 100% or at 0%.
 
I got the cheapest HDMI cables I could find (Amazon, I think) and they have worked amazingly for the past year and half.

I think they were so cheap they didn't have a brand name, it was gold plated.

For reference, It was 6 feet for about 10-12 bucks.
 
Up to about 3 metres, any HDMI cable will do the job. Above 3 metres and you can start to get enough signal degradation that some cables that are not HDMI 1.3-certified can start to have problems. There was an article recently (can't remember where) that did a lot of testing of cables. In pretty much every case, the most expensive cables performed no better than cheap cables with the same certification.

Since very few people need longer than a 3m cable, pretty much any cable will do (but I'd buy and HDMI 1.3 cable). I would be looking elsewhere for the source of the problem.

1. Are you getting any audio over HDMI?

2. Do you have the ATI HDMI audio driver installed?

3. Is the HDMI audio selected as the output?

4. Are you going directly from your HTPC to a receiver capable of receiving a 5.1 signal over HDMI, or are there any intervening devices?

5. Do you have the correct input selected on the receiver? It can sometimes be tricky with re-assignable ports to ensure that the right input is selected.

6. What codecs are you running - is it possible that the audio is not being bitstreamed, but instead is being decoded and downmixed?
 
This has been discussed many times before. The "it's digital it's a 1 or a 0" or "it's either 100% or it's nothing" or "any cheap cable will do" arguments are FALSE. Don't listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.

Here... for reference. Read: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262951
 
Get cables at monoprice or cablewholesale. Very cheap. I got a 25' HDMI cable for $25 about 2 years ago. Very high quality cable.
 
w1retap said:
This has been discussed many times before. The "it's digital it's a 1 or a 0" or "it's either 100% or it's nothing" or "any cheap cable will do" arguments are FALSE. Don't listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.

Here... for reference. Read: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262951
Click to expand...
Thank you, you beat me to it.

You had to see the pitiful hdmi cable that came bundled with my satellite receiver, it produced a shrunken picture with all the colors reversed. Went to their official help forums and found out that most people had the same problem with their bundled cables.

I second the Monoprice option, cheap but great quality digital cables, even their low end ones work as intended.
 
I agree with w1retap, but also with everyone else, the cables that are having issues are basically not performing to standard, hence, I'd rate them as 0% (any data loss might as well be total data loss)

monoprice/freebies from comcast work fine (the freebies from comcast put the $200 Monster cables to shame in build quality imho, no idea about any other provider)
 
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