I have been sitting on the fence on this issue for a bit now, not having done any comparisons of my own, but with the recent offer of a free Chord Silver Plus HDMI cable with a new subscription to WHFSAV I figured, "what better opportunity?" So I subscribed and got my cable today, and immediately set off to do some tests. I have 3 types of HDMI lead that I used for this test, the Chord, a Cambridge Audio 3m that usually sits between the AVR and TV, and a £9.99 1m brandless HDMI 1.3 cable that normally connects my BD to the AVR. First I tested sound between just the Chord and the £9.99 jobber. I played both Dark Knight and Quantum of Solace on both sets of cables. The Chord Cable sounded like it had a fuller and more detailed low mid frequency area that was especially apparent in TDK's score that uses Cellos and Double Bass to play the main themes. The biggest differences were apparent when I tested all three cables connecting the BD directly to the TV. For this I used the second chapter of the Great Plains episode of Planet Earth. This is a good torture test scene as it has a distant overhead shot of a massive caribou migration. As the camera is panning up with the movement of the caribou, there is a hole in the herd where you see a spot of grass near the middle of the image. When up close to the TV on the £9.99, that spot shimmered and jumped up and down by a few pixels regularly and had significant blocking of the green areas of grass lacking definition, as it was obvious that more attention was being paid to the movement of the animals. Switching to the CA cable the area didn't jump as much and still had some blocking, but overall was a marked improvement. Switching to the Chord HDMI the scene lacked any visible errors, which surprised me as I thought that this must be a by-product of the compression on the transfer, it had loads of detail without blocking in the grass area and it tracked perfectly without a hint of pixel jumping. I know it's harder to quantify audio performance and placebo could definitely play it's part in that equation, but the results in the video test were remarkable. I even checked each cable a couple more times to make sure with exactly the same results.
The downside of this is I now have to get more quality HDMI cables to fill out the rest of my signal chain.
The downside of this is I now have to get more quality HDMI cables to fill out the rest of my signal chain.
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