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Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

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Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#91

Post by jerf »

stavrianos wrote: post #89
jerf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second order effects, of course. If Samsung ships a cheap HDMI cable in the box, it's very little skin off their nose; they raise the price by their cost, about $2, and even in the competitive TV market that's probably absorbable to some extent. But what happens next? They ship their TV to Best Buy, who quickly notices the TV ships with an HDMI cable, "robbing" them of the chance to sell a Monster cable. Or worse, th…

So, when I buy a TV, it's effectively being subsidized by other people's cable purchases.

Assuming my discussion above is correct, which is a big assumption, yes.

One of the other consequences of misinformed consumers is sometimes merely being an informed consumer allows you to sponge off a bit of value from the uninformed ones too. See also "being in the small fraction of people that turn in their rebates"; everybody bought based on the advertised price, but only you and a few others paid it. (If you're like me, you properly factor in time-to-prepare-rebate and risk-of-no-return, though I personally have had very good success. I don't bother with $2 rebates; take out the stamp, the time, the risk of missing it, and you end up with little or possibly even negative. But I've scored $50 rebates for things I might have paid full price for willingly anyhow. That's a win.)

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

matwood wrote: post #83
ghshephard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you've never had an Ethernet Cable that got caught in a door. Or was terminated poorly. Or doesn't have the insulator sheath under the crimp. Or run parallel to a set of Florescent light ballasts. All of these events can reduce performance on Ethernet without causing it to fail outright. There is a reason why every single TIA/EIA 568 cable plant is carefully tested for things like Near End Cross Talk (NEXT),…

You're confusing what I was saying. In an HDMI situation if you use a cheap cable and the picture and sound are fine, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to change anything. With HDMI in particular, if the cable is failing you'll know right away with either a poor picture or sound. It won't have the gradations that were possible when pushing an analog signal around - i.e. the picture looks could, but it could b…

[deleted]

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#93

Post by ghshephard »

matwood wrote: post #29
micks56 wrote: post #10

My patience for the line, "It is digital. It either works or it doesn't" ended a long time ago. "Digital" signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold there is a gray area where you can't really tell whether your signal will be interpreted as 1 or 0. I am not defending the need for high-end HDMI cables. But saying "It…

I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destin…

Note, it's traditional on HN to add the phrase [EDIT] when making substantive modifications to comments, particularly if someone has already responded to your original comment.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#94

Post by electromagnetic »

tel wrote: post #82
pak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything running over Ethernet has packets with checksums. Yes, noise will cause packets to drop, and that results in lower overall throughput, while connectivity still remains possible. The signal running over HDMI is not packet-based. You don't have any mechanism like with TCP where packets can get dropped and resent later. So if interference causes bits to flip on an HDMI connection, you will immediately see the i…

Again, nobody is disagreeing. This isn't a defense of Monster, it's a typical It's More Complicated Than That jibe. Don't buy Monster unless that flowchart checks out, but also realize that it's not impossible to see signal degradation on those cheaper digital cables. It's just a lot less likely.

A $10 cable should fail before a $250 cable, however the frequency of failures for an infrequently moved or manipulated cable should still give it a longevity of a few years.

A $10 cable wont fail 25 times within the lifespan of the technology it's attached to. HDMI won't exist before you get 25 failures, unless you enjoy hammering nails into you cables or some other bizarre behaviour.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#95

Post by gridspy »

andrewcaito wrote: post #90

I'm reminded of an incident a few years back when Monster sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable. The CEO wrote them a response that was pretty well publicized: http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs-on-monst... I bought some cables from http://www.bluejeanscable.com/ a few months later. I needed to make a few longer than normal runs, and they had reasonable prices and were direct about the c…

Awesome rebuttal by Blue Jeans. I wanted to fist pump at the end.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#96

Post by whatusername »

ghshephard wrote: post #58
matwood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destin…

Clearly you've never had an Ethernet Cable that got caught in a door. Or was terminated poorly. Or doesn't have the insulator sheath under the crimp. Or run parallel to a set of Florescent light ballasts. All of these events can reduce performance on Ethernet without causing it to fail outright. There is a reason why every single TIA/EIA 568 cable plant is carefully tested for things like Near End Cross Talk (NEXT),…

"Or run parallel to a set of Florescent light ballasts."

Really? Crap. I've just run the cable down to a back room (for an x360) - and it goes straight alongside a couple of flouro tubes.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#97

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ghshephard wrote: post #93
matwood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destin…

Note, it's traditional on HN to add the phrase [EDIT] when making substantive modifications to comments, particularly if someone has already responded to your original comment.

OT: The site should really help to enforce such niceties. When you edit you should get a "reason for editing" box.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#98

Post by wmf »

thmz wrote: post #11
vital101 wrote: post #6

I always thought that the "high end" cable market was a rip-off. Even as someone who loves high quality audio, its REALLY hard to tell the difference between a moderately priced cable and a high end one.

Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-end_audio_cables There is a nice quote on it: "no other product is as shrouded in hype and mystery as the audio cable!" I also like high quality audio. But most of the time just a good thick electric copper cable will do the job. Also saves you a lot of $.

The idea of basing expensive audiophile equipment on unbalanced audio seems silly; if they really cared about quality, wouldn't they be using balanced signaling?

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#99

Post by teeja »

Unless you know exactly why you need the expensive one, you don't need it.

Unless a reasonable-length cable is damaged or malconstructed in such a way that it distorts transmitted waveforms so much that they're not recoverable, any reasonable conductor will work. This stuff isn't rocket science since about a year after RS232 was invented.

Re: Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)

#100

Post by derefr »

frou_dh wrote: post #72
lurkinggrue wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real time to worry about the quality of those cables is when you go over 6 feet.

Unless you are making your own cables, I don't see why. If the >6 feet cheap cable you bought doesn't work properly then it is faulty and you can get a refund.

"The real time to worry about the quality of those cables is when you go over 6 feet," would make sense as something said to the cable manufacturer. Translated to consumer-speak, that would be "it's really quite hard to find cheap HDMI cables longer than 6 feet from a well-known brand." (Of course, shady brands will just sell the crappy cables and rely on people's innate laziness and stores with no-refunds policies.)
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