Why HDMI Brands Don't Matter

This is just propaganda made up by people that are super jealous of my $12M HDMI cable!
 
BlueAqua said:
Big surprise, its a digital signal, cables matter not.
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Then why have an HDMI standard if cable quality doesn't matter?

That being said, the HDMI standard is all you really need, the rest (like gold plated contacts) is overkill.
 
I take it BB and other retailers don't want people to see that review..
 
I do home theaters for a living, and I've been saying this since HDMI came out. It's digital data, just like optical cables. The signal is either there or it's not.

Now if I'm doing a run over 15', I start looking at more expensive stuff, but under that, monoprice cables work perfectly for me and my clients. I actually use it as part of my pitch, when all my competitors are using these crazy expensive cables and trying to justify it, I tell them that every cable going into their system is $30 each. Make the client feel all warm and fuzzy like I'm not trying to rip them off...

I did a comparison years ago, used a $10, $100, and $500 cable. NO DIFFERENCE at all. If anything, the expensive one looked worst, but that may have been a bias on our part!! LOL
 
AthlonXP said:
I take it BB and other retailers don't want people to see that review..
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I doubt it. This reminds me of the first computer I ever bought, which unfortunately was at a BB in 1998. Hey, I didn't know any better.
Anyway, the BB sales guy tried to get me to buy a parallel port cable for the printer that had gold plated ends and cost a lot more because he said it would work faster/better.
BB..trying to screw people for over a decade and still going. The technology changes, but not their ways.
 
VolvoR said:
I do home theaters for a living, and I've been saying this since HDMI came out. It's digital data, just like optical cables. The signal is either there or it's not.

Now if I'm doing a run over 15', I start looking at more expensive stuff, but under that, monoprice cables work perfectly for me and my clients. I actually use it as part of my pitch, when all my competitors are using these crazy expensive cables and trying to justify it, I tell them that every cable going into their system is $30 each. Make the client feel all warm and fuzzy like I'm not trying to rip them off...

I did a comparison years ago, used a $10, $100, and $500 cable. NO DIFFERENCE at all. If anything, the expensive one looked worst, but that may have been a bias on our part!! LOL
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we do a ton of home theater installs (electrical contractor) and we have never used expensive cable.
We do use v1.4 in-wall rated cables with runs up to 100' with no signal loss, no issues what so ever and our cost with direct supplier is .67 pf. Cost with local "home theater specialist" $4.50 pf, so obviously we use the cheaper cable.
 
Gnasher said:
And that warrants a $100.00 or more markup in price? Hell no!!!
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I agree. However, buying something with a bad build quality means you have a higher chance of failure over something with a good build quality.

If a company certifies their product after receiving it, they can weed out the failures and only sell the good ones. This will push up their price some, since they are not selling everything which was made. If you start with higher build quality you will also have higher prices. It is simply how reality works.

You also make the mistake of assuming everything in China has poor build quality which is not true. Even Cambridge Audio equipment is built in China and it is not junk build quality.
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No, definately not. Just like there are whites who can jump, there are items built in China which have good build quality. The general rule of thumb still applies. This is why most of the major Japanese AVR builders (for example) make their low end models in China but their high end models in Japan.

I noticed you like to pretend things were said and then argue against them. You should stop doing this, it makes you appear foolish. Most people do not want to appear foolish, so I thought I would let you know.
 
I just ran 30 feet of the cheapest hdmi cable I could find for my htpc and it kicks ass.
 
I have purchased 4x 50ft cables from monoprice, hooked them up to a monoprice HDMI splitter which equals about 100ft length worth of HDMI cables and had absolutely no quality issues. In total I probably have about 15 different size HDMI cables, from 1ft to 6ft, all costing between 1-8$. They function fine from 1080p content to 3D content.
 
Corporate Goon said:
I was unaware that the thousands of factories and millions of people employed in said factories in China all manufactured things in the exact same way.
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Never said that. But I am sure that inventing things people say and then arguing against them is what you have to do to ever win an argument. You are pretty good at it, so you might as well keep doing it.

"Made in China"=Crap may have been true thirty years ago. It has absolutely no bearing on quality today - what matters is the standards to which the product was manufactured, not the location it was manufactured.
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Not entirely true. You can have a lot of rework due to bad quality, or you can not spend the money and send it out anyway.

You can buy 30 $3 HDMI cables for the price of one Monster HDMI cable. I doubt you'll go through $30 cheap HDMI cables even if you are hotswapping your stuff 15 times a day. I have a 50' HDMI cable from Bluejeanscable that I payed about $50 for (cheap for an HDMI of that length at the time I bought it, ~5 years ago), and it works great. Never any trouble.
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You are aware that the low end Bluejeanscable cables are made in China but their high end ones are produced in the US (not in China), right? Why is this? The same reason the Japanese AVR makers produce their low end products in China and their high end ones in Japan. Build Quality.

Rework is required when quality is low. Good companies pay for this rework. Not so good ones do not and instead simply sell the products without fully testing them. The buyer then gets a bad cable fresh from the store.
 
Monoprice cables are good for digital/optical signals. I wouldn't use them for analogs such as interconnects though.
 
Ragenrok said:
Ive noticed walmarts around me have started selling cheaper $10 6ft hdmi cables and they can never stay on the shelf lol. Made me mad to cause I needed one more hdmi cable for my new PVR and they were sold out for 2 weeks straight, while I can buy one cheaper online it only stays cheaper if im ordering other stuff. Otherwise shipping makes it the same price and I have to wait for shipping. For now Ive started buying my hdmi's at walmart again :p
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Even with shipping a 6ft cable on monoprice is 6.35.
 
cybrsage said:
No, definately not. Just like there are whites who can jump, there are items built in China which have good build quality. The general rule of thumb still applies. This is why most of the major Japanese AVR builders (for example) make their low end models in China but their high end models in Japan.

I noticed you like to pretend things were said and then argue against them. You should stop doing this, it makes you appear foolish. Most people do not want to appear foolish, so I thought I would let you know.
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take your own advice.
 
ocellaris said:
HDMI will display normal looking frames even with a lot of missing and incorrect 1s and 0s. A lot of people that have tried long runs of HDMI cables have seen this, you end up with "sparkly" image frames and the show goes on. Whoa, but its digital, it should be perfect or not work at all, how does that happen? :rolleyes:
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ECC can only compensate so much. This ain't NASA ya know ;)
Plus you'll NEVER get a perfect square wave. The number of harmonics you have to transmit to get a simple 1ns rising edge is ridiculous.
 
It's odd this pcmag.com article is dated 5/13/11 when I read the same thing from another source at least a couple weeks ago. I think I still have the article on my HTPC's Firefox browser, which I'll check tonight if I remember.

Anyway, overpaying for HDMI cables is for fools. The rest of us shop at MonoPrice (unless they're being hacked) or similar. :cool:
 
Low quality stuff is always crap. Low quality HDMI cables are crap. They'll fall apart, they don't protect against electrical interference, they'll give of toxic fumes, they won't work over longer distances, whatever. The good news, quality HDMI cables are still dirt cheap.

Without shielding, in an electrically noising environment, a lot of zeros and ones will get lost in a digital cable. There's no error correction to fix this, so a crappy cable will produce a lower quality picture. If there were error correction, as there is with Youtube over Ethernet, a crappy cable would result in a loss of speed, rather than picture quality.
 
Stone Cold said:
Low quality stuff is always crap. Low quality HDMI cables are crap. They'll fall apart, they don't protect against electrical interference, they'll give of toxic fumes, they won't work over longer distances, whatever. The good news, quality HDMI cables are still dirt cheap.

Without shielding, in an electrically noising environment, a lot of zeros and ones will get lost in a digital cable. There's no error correction to fix this, so a crappy cable will produce a lower quality picture. If there were error correction, as there is with Youtube over Ethernet, a crappy cable would result in a loss of speed, rather than picture quality.
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Good to know. Next time I want to hot-swap HDTV's underneath a functioning high-tension power line in next to a toxic waste plant that was hit by a nuclear weapon (taking time out to huff the new electronics smell coming off of the cords) I'll take your advice. It certainly would have been good to know the last time that happened.
 
STR said:
Good to know. Next time I want to hot-swap HDTV's underneath a functioning high-tension power line in next to a toxic waste plant that was hit by a nuclear weapon (taking time out to huff the new electronics smell coming off of the cords) I'll take your advice. It certainly would have been good to know the last time that happened.
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Pwned.

George Carlin once said "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that," and that is why people buy these overpriced HDMI cables.
 
but, but...

I paid so much for these virgin copper molecularly aligned monster cables
 
STR said:
Good to know. Next time I want to hot-swap HDTV's underneath a functioning high-tension power line...
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You underestimate the ability of oriental manufacturers to produce crap. Imagine 50-gauge aluminum wire coated with dioxin-contaminated plastic...
 
fatrat said:
That being said, the HDMI standard is all you really need, the rest (like gold plated contacts) is overkill.
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Well, not really, gold doesn't corrode like nickel and tin and corrosion can be an issue. Corrosion has caused me sound crackling issues on a few cheaply produced audio products but can easily be fixed with an electrical contact cleaner. Gold contacts is better for that reason though.
 
cybrsage said:
I noticed you like to pretend things were said and then argue against them. You should stop doing this, it makes you appear foolish. Most people do not want to appear foolish, so I thought I would let you know.
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Keep telling yourself that and you will eventually believe it. You are the one who made wide sweeping foolish comments and then came back and agreed with me to make it look like you didn't.
 
86 5.0L said:
they are differences, my monoprice cables have started falling apart at the connectors, while my more expensive cables are fine :)
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Or you could buy a dozen monoprice ones for the price of the expensive one and just replace them as they fail. I am sure they will still last a LOT longer.
 
arentol said:
Or you could buy a dozen monoprice ones for the price of the expensive one and just replace them as they fail. I am sure they will still last a LOT longer.
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Even the cheaper $29 cable at Best Buy has a lifetime warranty. You can waltz into the store with your cable that's falling apart and waltz out with a new one. This is one thing I never got while I worked at Best Buy. I worked there for almost six years, and for the last year I worked at geek squad. It was only part-time, as I had full-time employment elsewhere, but I still enjoyed it, and liked to help folks out.

I'd take customers over to get an HDMI cable for whatever reasons - they wanted to hook their desktop/laptop to their HDTV, wanted to get an HDTV for a monitor, wanted to make an HTPC, etc. - and I would grab the $29 6 foot HDMI cable. It's not a bad cable. I have several, and even they are built a tad better than my monoprice cables, of which I have quite a collection, and the warranty is nice. The store actually makes good margin on those cables as well.

What sucks is that while I'm over there, if I don't avoid a home theater associate, they will try and get my computer customers to buy the $80 monster cable. Yes, it is built better, and probably will never die, but the store brand has a LIFETIME WARRANTY! And we still make lots of money on it. Why can't they just be happy with that? I will give my customers "the look" and we will walk away, where I will explain to them that it doesn't make a difference. I will even tell them they can get cheaper cables online, and that the quality is just the same. Some will buy them online. I happily give them the website to look. Most will get our cheaper cable just because they can walk in and get a replacement any time they need one. $29 is reasonable to pay for some convenience, but $80?? I was embarrassed to have to tell a customer that it didn't make any difference at the same time another associate was saying that it did. They should know better.

Stay the hell away from my sale anyways, fool!! :D
 
Like most people here I was aware of this a long time ago. It´s good to see reiterated.

Just yesterday I was researching a DAC and came across this at PS Audio (American High End audio comapany)

"Please note that “digital bits ain’t just bits”.
The quality of your digital interconnect cable, or USB cable can have a major impact on the sonic
performance of your DLIII. Make sure you invest some time and money in choosing the right digital
interface cable."
http://powerplayadmin.psaudio.com/~psaudio/uploads/files/manual_DLIII.pdf

Found in the brochure for their flag ship DAC. This bothers me, since these people are very skilled hardware engineers and electrical engineers. Obviously they sell cables too, but man it´s disappointing from people who claim to take the BS out of audio.
 
@nakedhand: actually in case of streaming devices with no time for error correction the interference does matter. Of course again we talk about crazy cable lengths, not your ordinary 1m USB cable. On other side, i can't imagine anyone choosing USB over SPDIF/Toslink for anything more than 1m.
 
faugusztin said:
@nakedhand: actually in case of streaming devices with no time for error correction the interference does matter. Of course again we talk about crazy cable lengths, not your ordinary 1m USB cable. On other side, i can't imagine anyone choosing USB over SPDIF/Toslink for anything more than 1m.
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So it does matter?! Enlighten me more, please. How does this work, I am curious about this.
 
For some use cases yes, it does matter. If you are doing a recording and you want perfect data transfer from a streaming device with failure recovery option, then yes it does matter. Maybe a example will be better - when you copy data from the hard drive, in background there is a CRC check which checks the data and if the checksum of the data doesn't match this CRC value, then it rereads the data fromt he source again. You cannot do this with streaming devices, especially if we talk about recording of some live event, for example if you record some music. On other side, if this happens to your TV while watching something from your HTPC via a HDMI cable, at worst you get some minor picture block failure at some part of the screen - 99% of users will not care at all.

In short, there are rare use cases where cable quality does matter even for digital use, because these use cases have no error recovery or possibility to reread the damaged data. But these uses cases are really rare, one of them being the devices like DAC you linked.
 
PS: It's called Isonchronous USB data transfer :
Isochronous Transfer

Isochronous Transfer is most commonly used for time-dependent information, such as multimedia streams and telephony.

This transfer type can be used by full-speed and high-speed devices, but not by low-speed devices.

Isochronous transfer is periodic and continuous.

The isochronous pipe is unidirectional, i.e., a certain endpoint can either transmit or receive information. Bi-directional isochronous communication requires two isochronous pipes, one in each direction.

USB guarantees the isochronous transfer access to the USB bandwidth (i.e., it reserves the required amount of bytes of the USB frame) with bounded latency, and guarantees the data transfer rate through the pipe, unless there is less data transmitted.

Since timeliness is more important than correctness in this type of transfer, no retries are made in case of error in the data transfer. However, the data receiver can determine that an error occurred on the bus.
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No retries = you need every bit to go through without errors = you can have problems with interference with the really cheap cables.

But we were talking about HDMI and not USB, right ? :)
 
SirKronan said:
Even the cheaper $29 cable at Best Buy has a lifetime warranty. You can waltz into the store with your cable that's falling apart and waltz out with a new one. This is one thing I never got while I worked at Best Buy. I worked there for almost six years, and for the last year I worked at geek squad. It was only part-time, as I had full-time employment elsewhere, but I still enjoyed it, and liked to help folks out.
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I've always wanted to ask this to a Geek Squad employee. How do you stare someone in the eye and tell them "We'll install that $30 piece of software for $50 and all we do is put the CD in and press 'go?'"

My father recently purchased a new laptop for my grandmother and when they went to ring it up, it was $80 more than the sticker price. Why? Because Geek Squad already preinstalled Norton Antivirus on it. Safe to say my dad turned right around and picked a box that didn't have Norton Antivirus preinstalled. How do you people get away with that stuff lol?
 
Ditto. I've bought lots of cables of various types (hdmi, dvi, vga, component, audio, power, etc.) from monoprice over the years. All of them have performed great except the RCA to 3.5mm cables. The 3.5mm cables always ended up with problems right at the connector/wire joints.

450 said:
+1.

Only thing I have from monoprice that I didn't like is their basic RCA to 3.5mm y cables.
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Stone Cold said:
Low quality stuff is always crap. Low quality HDMI cables are crap. They'll fall apart, they don't protect against electrical interference, they'll give of toxic fumes, they won't work over longer distances, whatever. The good news, quality HDMI cables are still dirt cheap.

Without shielding, in an electrically noising environment, a lot of zeros and ones will get lost in a digital cable. There's no error correction to fix this, so a crappy cable will produce a lower quality picture. If there were error correction, as there is with Youtube over Ethernet, a crappy cable would result in a loss of speed, rather than picture quality.
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Hey Mr. Gullible, I've got a cable for you. :cool:

AudioQuest - Vodka 26.3' HDMI Cable - White for the bargain price of $1,029.99. ;)

It's even got "vodka" in the name. Winning! :p
 
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