Do different brands of HDMI Cables really make a difference?

[Anonymous]

Miss Newsome,

Could you please give us the low down on the new HDMI Cable Rating Program called DPL?

Thanks

 

[Anonymous]

If the cable improves your enjoyment of the product, buy it, if not, don't....

I bought a 3rd party scart lead for the original xbox and thought the picture was nice and crisp. Then bought the official M$ one and the picture was much brighter and crisper....

I believe there is a difference in cables, but it's marginal.....

I havew upgraded my scart between tv and sky box, and got silver anniversary speaker, in these instances I didnt notice any difference at all from the freebie sky scart and some £1 a metre speaker wire I was using...

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="stealthdave"]If the cable improves your enjoyment of the product, buy it, if not, don't....

I bought a 3rd party scart lead for the original xbox and thought the picture was nice and crisp. Then bought the official M$ one and the picture was much brighter and crisper....

I believe there is a difference in cables, but it's marginal.....

I havew upgraded my scart between tv and sky box, and got silver anniversary speaker, in these instances I didnt notice any difference at all from the freebie sky scart and some £1 a metre speaker wire I was using...[/quote]

That's a most unhelpful answer. You're telling us to base our buying decision on "enjoyment"?

Ok, so based on this rather "vague" qualitative criteria, go ahead and recommend me the HMDI cable I will enjoy the most. Don't know? Too subjective? Hence my point about that being an unhelpful answer. (and scart isn't digital anyway)

(Just give me error rate comparisons for different cables and I'll be happy.)

 

[jerryyeatman]

I'm new here but would like to comment. I've been interested in hi-fi and then later home cinema for about 16 years now. I've worked in the IT industry for the last 12 years and with my day to day findings have become a little cynical of expensive digital coax interconnects and HDMI cables.

If data is being lost over a digital cable, the cable is either faulty or is close to a (very!) strong source of interference or it fails to meet the specification. For example CAT5 100BASE-T must comply to a standard where it must not exceed 100m length, must have 24 guage copper and must have a certain number of twists per inch amongst other things. It comes in both shielded and unshielded varieties, the latter is the most common (UTP). It's cheap (about £25 for 100 metres)

It's possible to measure packet loss in repetitive testing. If packet loss is not taking place over a 100megabit connection on a 50 metre length of cheap UTP cable, I think it's extremely unlikely that there will be any loss on a 4 or 5 metre length of coax cable or HDMI with higher specifications. I realise that the data on coax interconnects isn't transmitted in packets but streamed instead but I think it could be conclusively PROVED that there is no data loss using the right equipment. I don't know how HDMI data is transmitted.

In the hifi market place it's in all parties' interests to market the importance of high quality (and high value) cables.

 

[Anonymous]

Have you ever actually done or witnessed any objective tests that cables meet the specifications that they claim to meet? Possibly you are subjectively assuming that the claims made by their manufacturers are correct and are open to the suggestion that if the manufacturer claims compliance with a specification then everything will be fine and dandy?

I think that your assumption is open to question.

Read the reviews on this Cat5e cable here

Obviously this is also third hand data, but perhaps you get the point - in a cat 5e ethernet network packet loss isn't generally severe and is usually invisible to the user as the system actively monitors and resends as necessary. Regardless as a systems engineer of 20 or so years living mostly real to near real time I always expect to get the data to get through - but I never assume that it will.