Cable Fun. Now it all becomes clear.

[Anonymous]

How can obesrving two things side by side for yourself be biased?

 

[Thaiman]

[quote user="Andy Clough"]OK, all you cable sceptics out there, here's a challenge. If you can make it to
the What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision Show here at the London Novotel-Hammersmith,
take the time to visit the Chord Co stand [/quote]

I am totally believe in Cable when it's come to vision products. I have Thor and QED scart leads and the different from the freebies one is massive. I bet you can't make picture look better with different power leads though! I try a few different one and my jaw was firmly in place! I could not see one pixel that look different.

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="jimwall"]
How can obesrving two things side by side for yourself be biased?

[/quote]

Two different TVs set up differently to one another wouldn't be too difficult to arrange.

 

[Anonymous]

Well that's a fair point, there are lots of ways to frig this, even down to using a dirty disk, but without knowing what the set up is it's a rather harsh accusation to make. There are plenty of ways to remove such variables, and there is always the possibility of honesty, however difficult you find that to acknowledge.

What's more, even then it depends on the nature of the observed difference - if it's just colour saturation or contrast then clearly (even on a single screen) that could be due to the setup for differences, but if it's blockiness or break up (in e.g. fast moving images) then I'd suggest it could indeed be cable induced - or at least I'd be asking the question what else could be causing it.

A more interesting question might be - how bad is the cheap cable. If it's only HDMI 1.0 and they're passing 1080p across it, then clearly it's not specified to support that so it wouldn't be a like for like comparison. But again I don't know the setup and I can't go. So I'm going to have to rely on others to pass fair and properly informed comment, rather than ill-informed speculation that's verging on libel. (Again.)

 

[Andrew Everard]

As Andy said on his original post, 'on a 42in Fujitsu', not two screens side by side. So bang goes that theory. Oh and same player, same disc, run through a Lumagen scaler outputting 720p. Two cables, one a basic Molex, the other Chord's own HDMI Silver. So one under £20, the other around four times as much.

No hard sell, no salesman prompting of what you should be seeing, just 'have a look and see what you think'. Ramming the cable down your throat is a) uncomfortable and b) not very tall Nigel's style.

But do I detect some suspicion from the forum that a company having such a demonstration is doing so to allow visitors to see for themselves what that company believes to be the superiority of its own products?

Whatever next? The cads! Etc...

 

[Anonymous]

Cool (a little bit bibble on the grounds that I do believe that if you obey the rules (ie. use properly specified cable) then digital really should be the same at the receiving end as the transmitting end) that's a fair few of the issues addressed I think.

A couple of things I'd still like you to comment upon, again given that I'm not there to see for myself:

what happens if you swap the HDMI leads around at one end - since my plasma lets me tailor individual inputs for contrast, colour saturation, lots of stuff, as presumably the two leads go into different inputs on the same screen. If they are switched into the same input this is clearly moot.

what actually is the difference between the picture on the two screens? It would be nice, as someone who can't attend, to have something beyond "better". Ideally something that is obviously data-transmission related might be nice under the circumstances... (and to be fair, if Chord are trying to show their cable is better it's not an unreasonable thing to ask for).

As an aside, if a certain old gent with a bit of an odorous behind could comment and suggest other things to check that could make this demonstration "biased" then it would obviously be good. Assuming of course he hasn't the ability or gumption to actually attend in person 🙂

Guess he has about 12 hours to comment...

 

[Thaiman]

As for me I will be hunting for a demo of equipments that nice to the ears rather than the eyes.

 

[Andrew Everard]

[quote user="jimwall"]
what actually is the difference between the picture on the two screens? [/quote]

Less noise, better detail, and in particular better shadow detail.

 

[Anonymous]

Best not to argue with Zoot. Let him use his 'Just as good as' cheapo cables. If he believes he is getting the best possible from his equipment then let him live in his bubble. The rest of us can enjoy the reality of better cables.

I do also agree shops like Currys etc charge OTT for what is very cheap cable.

Brent