HDMI leads...what is the difference?

MidlandsGlory

The only real issue is capacitance. The thickness or quality of the conductors is of little consequence as the signals are of such little current, voltage drop isn't an issue. But run two (or more) conductors alongside each other and you form a capacitor. The longer they run together, the bigger the capacitor. The higher the frequency of the signal the less capacitance it takes to upset it. On shorter cables it is too small to damage the signal on the cheapest cable.
So distance is almost no limit if you can control the capacitance that starts to short out the signals, you can do that by better and thicker insulation material around the conductors that inhibits it and most importantly, keeps them further apart, hence noodle's extra thick, extra long cables.

Heedtheadvice

Midlands is right that capacitance is of importance being one constituent part of impedance.

But it is not the only issue. Do you not believe EMI can be a problem @Midlands?

MidlandsGlory

Heedtheadvice said:

Midlands is right that capacitance is of importance being one constituent part of impedance.

But it is not the only issue. Do you not believe EMI can be a problem @Midlands?

Yes EMI can certainly be an issue but you would hope any hdmi cable would have sensible screening and digital signals being less affected than analogue .
Certainly its worth trying to keep hdmi cables away from power cables to avoid inductive interference.

fred246

When I set up my home cinema I was taken in by these: https://www.whathifi.com/thatcable/hdmi/review. They connect nicely and are much thicker and they seem superior to the included cables. What HiFi make all sorts of claims for HDMI cables though. https://www.whathifi.com/products/accessories/hdmi-cables. Those reviews make some very strange claims. Are they all rubbish? I mean are the claims rubbish rather than the leads?

MinuteNoodles

fred246 said:

When I set up my home cinema I was taken in by these: https://www.whathifi.com/thatcable/hdmi/review. They connect nicely and are much thicker and they seem superior to the included cables. What HiFi make all sorts of claims for HDMI cables though. https://www.whathifi.com/products/accessories/hdmi-cables. Those reviews make some very strange claims. Are they all rubbish? I mean are the claims rubbish rather than the leads?

ROFLMAO. First 5 star review on that Whathifi page....
"    For:

• Stable images
• great colours
• impressive detailing
• tight, deep sound    "

ITS TRANSFERRING DIGITAL DATA YOU MUPPETS. As long as all the 1's and 0s make it from A to B in the same order they were sent that's what you'll get if it was that on the original source. Doesn't matter if it was that or the cheap Lindy cable they reviewed. 

RumRat

I've never read a review of any HDMI cable. I have mixture of different costing cables throughout the house with differing lengths, I think the longest is ten meters. the cheapest one was £3.50 and the most expensive being around £12 (The ten meter one I think). I've never noticed any difference in any of the cables used.
I don't use any of them to input 4K into my TV's (I stream that via Wi-Fi) so, don't need to upgrade any of them for anything at the moment. If I ever decide between the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X, then, maybe, I'll need to upgrade at least one of them, but, that's it.

Mickey666

The hifi world is renowned for snake oil and people who claim to have ‘golden ears’ that can tell the difference that a gold-plated mains plug can make to a sound system.  The same sort of people who also advocated running a black felt-tip pen around the edges of CDs to stop internal laser reflections affecting the sound quality. Listen to them at your peril.

Heedtheadvice

Oh I wish I could afford gold plated mains plugs and magic ears to go with them!

Well said Mickey!

Unfortunately there are lots of people who do not know what is required and have no idea of value and are convinced by the (IMHO) unscrupulous pushers of said snake oil with lots to gain through publications or gain selling good stuff at vastly ott prices or c##p at what seems reasonable prices!

I mentioned previously interference and this is most often digital source to analogue circuits. Many a question has been written recently on audio forums (including semi-professional users and musicians) regarding noise pickup. The source can be cheap digital cables. Still currently advertised are hdmi and usb cables specially for audio compatibility at mega bucks....so I assume people must buy them!.......a bit like go faster stripes when pumping up the tyres might be a better idea.

Had to laugh at https://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/52417/audioquest-mocha-high-speed-hdmi-cable-1m-w-ethernet/ (amongst others!); directional wires and biased for better 'multi octave' audio! Wonder what magic they use to extend the bandwidth to cope with video that requires speeds around that required by 100 audio channels?

Mickey666

Never mind HDMI cables, the snake oil salesmen would have us considering the start of the equipment chain and suggest investing in a decent power cable.  How about £20,000 for a 5m mains cable?  https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2011/11/20k-audio-power-cable-introduced/

After that, you'll need some decent speaker cables, so how about this for the bargain price of around £5,000 per metre!  https://www.alphr.com/blogs/2011/02/08/the-most-expensive-cable-in-the-world

I had a friend who was something of a hifi buff.  He wasn't in that league but his music system must have been nudging 5 figures.  Funny thing though, he only had about half a dozen CDs.  Guess he was more of a hifi fan than a music fan

Petriix

I too was sceptical about expensive HDMI cables but then I bought a new TV and decided to mount it on the wall on the opposite side of the room to where the AV receiver lives. I can't easily move the amp because it's wired to 10 ceiling speakers and various other equipment so a 10m HDMI was required to run under the flooring.

I initially bought a £14 cable with reasonable reviews - just about anything you can buy on Amazon has a small percentage of 1* reviews where people claim it blew up their house or maimed their dog, and this was no exception - and, on the whole, people said it would work just fine. However, after a brief test then a not-so-brief process of feeding the cable under the floor, the issues began. Every 10 minutes or so of watching a 4k source the screen would go blank for a second or two.

After much research (some of which involved trawling through posts by the sort of people who claim that gold plated power leads make an audible difference), I relented to buy a 'hybrid fibre optic' HDMI cable for about £40. Now, maybe I've been brainwashed, but this cable (which arrived in a fancy box, and despite being literally embedded in the floor) has performed flawlessly with no signal dropouts; despite being around a quarter of the thickness of the cable it replaced.

Make of that what you will.