Why all HDMI cables are the same | Hacker News Reader

Why all HDMI cables are the same

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231 pointsrheide79 comments

One advantage of more expensive cables is that they look nicer and feel a bit more solid. But fortunately, Amazon ruined that industry with their "Amazon Basics" line. Those are some of the best cables I've ever seen, they come in easy-to-open packaging, and they're dirt cheap. A two meter HDMI cable is $7, and it's nicer than any other HDMI cable I've seen.

I feel sorry for people that go to stores to buy things. What a waste of time and money.

I've never bought Amazon's because Monoprice's are about half that ($3.50). Monoprice's cables seem to be of great quality too - they're noticeably better than some of the $20 cables my parents have paid for at retailers.

+1 for Monoprice. Their prices are great, they have a large selection of cable types and lengths, and they are speedy.

With Amazon's convenience and large selection, it's hard for these niche shopping sites to gain any mindshare on me anymore. When I'm looking for something esoteric I usually check Amazon first and then possibly google product prices to make sure the price isn't substantially cheaper somewhere else. For me to switch away from Amazon at any place that hasn't been "grandfathered" in my mind like Zappos and Monoprice, you'd have to do it via price first, and then keep me with some sort of convenience or other hook.

I don't bother searching on price anymore. Amazon's $4 same-day or overnight shipping always makes up the difference. I have money, not time :)

True, Prime has pretty much obliterated every other retailer from my memory. It may not make them money directly, but it's a brilliant business move overall. Monoprice and Newegg are the only others that I even try now.

i've been a prime customer for a while as well.. and i love the convenience and guilt free shopping.. but i did notice that prime items are almost always more expensive then very similar items not available for prime shipments. so, the shipment cost is more likely split between amazon and the customer...

+1 Monoprice is the best place to get cables of all sorts, IMO. And overnight shipping is only $4.95!

+100 to Monoprice. Someone needs to either clone Monoprice's business model in Europe or they need to expand. If you can do that you will own my credit card for the next 10 years.

i was not aware of monoprice, thanks!

>One advantage of more expensive cables is that they look nicer and feel a bit more solid.

How often do you actually feel or see your HDMI cable? If you're setting things up correctly, you shouldn't be doing either very often.

Depends on your use case. I have a DVI->HDMI cable I lug around in my bag to hook my laptop up to HDTV displays at offices, etc.

I'm in A/V services, so we'll use and reuse 50-200ft stretches of HDMI, and the Amazon HDMIs are top notch. Of course, we're not the typical user of HDMI, but FWIW, they are pretty solid.

""When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

I'd prefer that the carpenter build the strongest/lightest product, only worrying about looks where someone can see it and strength where it matters.

To me the value of solid wood throughout is durability. If a composite material was better why not use it?

Steve Jobs was referring to plywood as an inferior material used not for any advantage except cost and ease of installation. His point was that if you care about quality in an all-encompassing way, not just as a means to an end, you're going to care about the quality of things that your customers will rarely or never see.

And yet, HFS+ is still there.

Couldn't agree more. I work in A/V services and we use Amazon for HDMI cabling. Often we have needs for 50, 100, and 200 ft HDMI cables, and Amazon is by far the best bargain. We use them multiple times, and they take wear and tear like a champ.

Another point just on HDMI in general: people sometimes wonder if a 200+ ft HDMI will lose picture or audio quality -- it doesn't. At least with these Amazon cable, they're still as clear as always.

Did you read the article? All or nothing, that's basically how HDMI-cables work.

I don't think aspir said anything contradictory. His point was additive to the article, just addressing another possible mis-conception about these cables.

>I feel sorry for people that go to stores to buy things. What a waste of time and money.

When I want something I often want it right now. Not next week, not even tomorrow. As soon as physically possible and I am willing to pay extra for that convenience.

I also like to handle mechanical before I buy it. Seeing a video of someone else handling it isn't always enough.

B&H Electronics in Manhattan actually seold me a 6 foot HDMI cable for $13. So its not "stores suck" its "most POS overpriced stores like BestBuy suck"

After 4 years and helping 100s of people with their PS3's loosing signal[1], I cannot agree with the article.

I understand the message of the article (that the $90 Monster cables are a scam) but the $1 skinny HDMI cable you got with your DVD player is not the same quality as the $10 one you picked up from MonoPrice, Amazon or Blue Jeans Cables (all 3 of my favorites for buying cables).

I don't know why, I am not an EE guy, I'm just saying after telling someone for the 200th time "Try this $10 cable from Amazon instead..." and having them come back with "It worked! The PS3 is fixed!", I'll just say all my personal experience suggests otherwise.

I am talking about fixing everything from "my colors look wrong" to "I have no picture!" with this recommendation.

I'd also point out that even at the ridiculously high end of cables where you are talking about gold-this and gold-that, to an average viewer there is no perceptible difference but there does seem to be a measurable difference in cable quality for really demanding runs[2], meaning YES there is a difference, but most people will never need/see/experience it unless you are doing a very long run.

[1] http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/ps3-hdmi-black-screen/

[2] http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/hdmi-cable-showdown-monster-mono...

I am talking about fixing everything from "my colors look wrong" to "I have no picture!" with this recommendation.

"I have no picture" will definitely be fixed with a better cable.

"My colors look wrong" will not, and cannot, be-- for the reasons discussed in the article.

Well, it could be fixed due to the placebo effect.

'fixed' :)

my colors look wrong == sparkles

Yep, seen the "sparkles" issue as well a handful of times and was corrected with a new cable.

> "My colors look wrong" will not, and cannot, be--

Believe me, I would agree with you had I not been troubleshooting the issue for the last 4 years, but it did fix it.

It is entirely possible the guy ended up changing more than just the cable and didn't mention it.

This experience reminds me a lot of the Google Ops Team talk at Google I/O this year where they gave stats on things that caused outages and kept punctuating the point that things you think are impossible, will happen at-scale.

"HDMI is a digital signal, it either works or doesn't, degraded analog signal artifacts are impossible!"

Apparently not =/

Never underestimate the power of the placebo effect.

I'd also like to say that digital signals should work or not work, however, when someones map doesn’t match the actual terrain, it’s usually not the terrain that’s wrong.

Could it be related to how the cable affects the transmitting or receiving circuitry? (Electrical impedance mismatch or crosstalk comes to mind.)

And this "it's digital" argument is bogus. The individual bit is either transmittes correctly or not, but the whole stream can have arbirary many bit errors which the receiver can only compensate up to a certain rate. There is usually good error correction on the audio streams (both listeners and speakers don't react well to sudden loud clicks), but errors in the video stream usually lead to artefacts that may be visible for are few fractions of a second or so (until the next full frame in the streams).

Whoever makes this "digital streams cannot degrade" argument has obviously never tried to watch DVB-T behind a hill.

DVB != HDMI.

I believe DVB-T uses MPEG-2 or some variation. While HDMI video doesn't use a motion vector based encoding. So when you have errors with MPEG-2, it could be on B or P frame which results in the delta from the previous I frame being drawn incorrectly (or not at all). With HDMI, the error won't show up in a delta frame (because there aren't any), rather just white pixels.

Yes. There are poor quality cables in the world, and using them can cause problems like intermittent signal drop or failure to detect the display. And this is no more or less true than it is with other cable types.

The real problem though is that in my experience cable build quality simply doesn't correlate with price. All the cables are built at the same handful of east asian factories, and subject to the same variance. If some component supplier gets swapped (more brittle casings for the wire, say, or a different plastic formula in the injection molds) then you end up with a cable that will fail unexpectedly or intermittently.

It's worth noting that you can't really spend $18 on a single HDMI cable at monoprice unless you are getting a super long one. No one should ever spend more than $7-10 on an HDMI cable.

For fun and profit: What I do when I order from monoprice is buy five or so at a time, which equals the price of a B&M cable, and then I sell my extras to friends for a buck or two over the monoprice cost, and then my cable is effectively free.

Here's what the article is saying - HDMI is like the internet, or digital TV; not like radio.

If your internet connection is working, HN looks the same with a good connection or a bad connection. If your internet connection is down, you get nothing. 0.01% of the time, you might get a garbled page from a bad connection, but it's not a common problem.

But people think that the cables are like radio antennas, and a better cable = better quality picture.

Digital stuff is actually far more annoying to fix. If your TV is black (not fuzzy, like it would be with a bad analog connection), you don't really know if it's the cable, the port, the video card, or something else.

> you might get a garbled page from a bad connection

But if you do, it isn't because the internet is bad and needs to be replaced (the cable in the analogy), it's because either the server or the client interpreted the signal incorrectly, and tried to display the page as correctly as possible, but failed.

Do you understand digital vs. analog? If yes, then in fact you do agree with the message of the article: a non-defective cable transmits a digital signal just as correctly as any other non-defective cable. Your experience just indicates that slightly more expensive cables are less likely to be defective.

I wish HDMI equipment would display a counter of digital errors. For all non-defective cables, this counter should be 0 all the time.

I wish HDMI equipment would display a counter of digital errors. For all non-defective cables, this counter should be 0 all the time.

Does the HDMI signal provide a checksum of any kind? I was under the impression that it's just a raw TMDS bitstream of color values with no redundancy.

I read the specs myself and found out that:

  * control packets (non-video, non-audio) are protected using TMDS Error Reduction Coding (TERC4)
  * audio packets seem error-protected at a higher level (by Dolby or DTS?)
  * video packets are *not* error-protected

Wow. I am shocked. How can anyone design a high-speed video digital transport layer these days without error correction? Source: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=6271817#p627181...

Good call on the display of errors...why is that not available in today's TVs?

Or is it? Maybe in some special diagnostic mode?

It seems to me that this is what the article is saying, actually. Really cheap cables may very well be faulty, but $10 cables are just as good as a $90 set.

I don't feel very confident about the article after reading the following: "Before sending the signal out via the HDMI output, the 1s and 0s are rearranged to minimize how many transitions there are. So instead of 10101010, the transmission may look like 11110000. If you really like math, how it does this is cool [wikipedia link to 8b/10b encoding] ..."

It's the other way around, the encoding makes sure there is a bit transition every now and then (details in wiki article); this is done in order to preserve the clock in the signal.

When someone writes an article on such a technical subject and messes up a technicality it makes me wonder whether there are more serious factual errors in there.

I agree with his point though, my $10 HDMI cable works perfectly :)

The "control" characters are chosen to have a high number of transitions, but the "data" characters are chosen to have fewer transitions. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Transition_Mi...

His description of how differential signaling is used is totally whacked too. His link to Wikipedia's "Phase Difference" page has "phase" in the title, but is irrelevant to how and why differential signaling is used ("puts the out-of-phase signal back in phase, then compares it to the "real" signal" Huh? Not.). He should have linked to "Differential Signaling" instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_signaling

DVI/HDMI uses it's own encoding (which together with CML-based physical layer is called TMDS - Transition Minimised Differential Signaling), that encode 8bit symbols as 10bit codewords, not the original IBM's 8B10B encoding. In contrast to most line codes, TMDS encoding is really designed to reduce number of bit transitions and thus output signal bandwidth (in the MHz sense). Clock recovery is different from most high speed serial interfaces, as HDMI/DVI provides separate signal with reference clock (which essentially eliminates problem with receiver clock drift that would otherwise necessitate inserting additional transitions into signal).

For people who don't "get it", I ask them if they think a Monster Ethernet cable would make the colors of the websites they view more crisp and vibrant. If they say yes, don't even bother.

If they say yes tell them that monster cables are a scam, but you know about the REAL good stuff. Them sell them an ordinary hdmi or ethernet cable at a 10,000% markup.

Just like the Smart Engineer: http://xkcd.com/670/

Unfair comparison. Ethernet and TCP have checksums and can retry failed transmissions, so you could have a cheap, crappy cable and you wouldn't know except for a slower transfer rate.

UDP doesn't…

Almost any link layer has it's own error detection and correction that is significantly more effective than TCP checksums, so "UDP doesn't" is not that relevant.

The are a couple of very helpful articles on the Blue Jeans cables sitee about what is wrong with HDMI.

"HDMI is a horrid format; it was badly thought out and badly designed, and the failures of its design are so apparent that they could have been addressed and resolved with very little fuss. Why they weren't, exactly, is really anyone's guess, but the key has to be that the standard was not intended to provide a benefit to the consumer, but to such content providers as movie studios and the like. It would have been in the consumer's best interests to develop a standard that was robust and reliable over distance, that could be switched, amplified, and distributed economically, and that connects securely to devices; but the consumer's interests were, sadly, not really a priority for the developers of the HDMI standard."

HDMI Cable: An Overview: http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm

What's the Matter with HDMI?: http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/whats-the-matter-with...

I don't have any HDMI based devices fortunately, but on the basis of these two articles a Blue Jeans cable might be a good option to go for as opposed to the cheapest possible.

Audioholics took on this issue with a bunch of bench testing back in 2008: http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/long-hdmi-cable-...

BTW, even though the site was using equipment from Monster, don't take that as an indication that they're in Monster's pocket: http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/monster-cable-... (there are any number of articles ripping on Monster on both audioholics.com and avrant.com)

Are there any vendor rebuttals to these claims? I suppose if you're spending $30k for Wilson Watt Puppy's, then $2.5k is chump change (http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connect...). Otherwise, I don't see how they could sneak this into consumer shopping carts.

Did you read the customer reviews on the Amazon page? Some of them are priceless.

I don't think that the vendors are "sneaking" this into the consumer shopping carts; I suspect that anyone buying this is either a) eager to be fooled, b) more interested in the "conspicuous consumption" aspects than the actual sound/picture quality, or c) a combination of the above.

Have you read the reviews for high end cables on Amazon - they seem to be a motherlode of sarcasm.

My favourite review is from John L (Border of Wasteland, Former USA) on a Denon cable:

"This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be sometime around 2007 for whomever is reading this. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. Something... happens with them. Something came through, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left. WE LIVE UNDERGROUND! ONLY YOU CAN STOP IT NOW. SAVE US. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES."

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B0...

Another great review: http://www.amazon.com/review/RETS8UQ5PLPFK/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm...

... The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me ....

(Don't miss the surprise ending.)

The product pictures for this one are great too.

I looked for the surprise ending, then I realised it's not the end of the comment but the price - "1 new from $9,999.00".

http://i.imgur.com/Kmuvf.jpg

Funny indeed! My favorite:

"I have mixed feelings about these cables. Yes, they have unprecedented clarity and range, but they are silver, which is chock full of small hadrons. If, like me, you are an audiophile particle physicist, you'll know that small hadrons degrade the transmission of audio signals by decohering individual notes, particularly quarter tones that have been reflected off of acoustic surfaces. Additionally, the quality of silences is tranquil, but not peaceful; Philip Glass's note-free "4'33" fails to achieve the the subtlety of a live performance."

http://www.amazon.com/review/RSXPVOGOCD14D/ref=cm_srch_res_r...

I thought this was common knowledge now.

You'd be surprised. I don't know the inner-workings of most electronics stores, but I bet the markup on cables like Monster is extraordinarily high. And most consumers (and maybe some sales people) don't know the differences so the stores push expensive cables on to their customers.

It's not just HDMI and home theater cables too. Here is a 6' USB 2.0 cable from Best Buy for $24.99:

http://bit.ly/qlOXza

And here's basically the same cable at Monoprice for $1.30:

http://bit.ly/9yG9wP

Never underestimate good marketing + gullible customers.

The last time I bought an HDMI cable I checked local stores because I didn't want to pay shipping on a $5-10 cable. The cheapest cable I found was on sale for $20 or something. Turns out it's cheaper to go with Monoprice and pay shipping on a $4 cable than to get one on sale in real life.

On top of in almost every store when I balked at the prices of $30-70 the salesman would try to tell me that if I bought a cheaper cable it would be subject to interference and would not work well. Most people who aren't technical and don't know that's bullshit don't stand a chance. They listen to anyone they feel is an authority on the matter. "Surely the guy at Futureshop or The Source knows more about tech than I do, I should listen to him. I can't find a cheaper cable anyway."

The margins on TVs and such are apparently pretty low and the way that they make money is on the high margin accessories they push on you. They will give you a "deal" on the cables so it looks like it's working out in your favour but it's still a scam. Hook, line, and sinker. Because it's only $5[-100 over the price of the set, which is likely over $1000, most people will just go with it because it seems like a small price to pay to get the most out of their shiny new TV.

I work in an Australian retailer. The markup is huge. We sell $40 HDMI cables that we get for $5. We also sell $99 cables.

Quite often, we make more money from people buying a $40 cable than we do from people buying a $2000 iMac.

Knowing a few friends in retail you find out a lot of these things. I never buy cables from physical stores anymore. At a local JB Hi-Fi you can find the standard $70-$80 HDMI cables in the AV section, however there are similar just as good cables in the Playstation/Xbox accessories section for $20.

I also love how many Apple accessories the stores around my area have, simply because they make more selling cases and protectors than the actual device.

There is actually only one just Apple store in my town, and they have a radio commercial in which all they say is that they sell iPod accessories. It seems almost sad that it is the only thing the store is trying to sell.

Except for the cables that are so cheap that they just don't work. :(

This headline (by the author or editor) is completely misrepresenting the article.

HDMI cables are different. Badly made ones, and ones rated differently, can fail in unpredictable ways. The article describes failure modes, and alludes to but brushes over technical differences.

Coincidentally, I personally spent 16+ hours on the better part of this past Thursday and Friday nights trying to get a Cablevision set top box (OptimumTV) to cooperate with an Onkyo receiver over HDMI.

I'd been using the receiver with a variety of equipment, and with a long run to a wall mounted TV, for several years. I swapped in a new TV, and added the set top box, and suddenly all HDMI related functions of the receiver started failing randomly, 90% of the time.

I eventually attributed this to HDMI negotiation between receiver and Cablevision's box. With STB plugged in, Boxee and DVD player would fail too. Without STB, the others would work.

With eight cables I had on hand, all "known good", the receiver HDMI indicator would either fail to light, with no picture and no sound on the TV, or blink rapidly, and the picture and sound would come and go rapidly. (To me, this suggests a flawed implementation of HDCP by the Optimium box, likely failing the receiver handshake as it acts as a repeater between STB and the TV, and this Onkyo has a hardware upscaler. An HDCP cable failure is alluded to in the CNET article, but all eight types I had on hand failed in the same way.)

Cable brands that failed: Monoprice, Amazon Essentials, Radio Shack, Firedog (Best Buy), and Monster. Also, these were all cables purchased before 2010.

I was not in the mood to buy a new receiver just to work with Cablevision's box, so I decided to try the Home Depot "installer" aisle, and selected "GE Ultra Pro HDMI with Ethernet" in a two pack of 6' lengths, and a 15' foot "in wall" installer kit as well.

http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202742223/h_d2/Produ...

These are labeled as supporting audio return channel, 3D, and Ethernet, and are rated for 4K video (not mentioned in the linked article). The Cablevision OptimumTV set top box does not use any of these features.

When I used this new HDMI cable, the whole system worked flawlessly. Dumbfounded, I repeatedly swapped in my other cables, but they all failed, while these worked. I had both a 15' and two 6' ones from this brand, and all three worked.

So no, not all HDMI cables are the same. I cannot attribute this particular behavior to "bad cables" or even "cheap cables", it has to be some feature of the cable design.

// Disclaimer: I dislike cable TV for its "bundling" practices, and hope Google wins their custom Hulu bid to force the studios to keep content online for non cable subscribers longer. I was doing this install for someone else.

Without seeing your installation one can only guess at a possible explanation, but it may be conceivable that a ground loop in the system was causing interference with all devices at a level higher than the common-mode rejection capability of the HDMI receivers. This might explain why your other devices would stop working when you plugged in the cable box. Maybe the GE cable was lacking a ground connection that was present in the other cables?

There are different HDMI versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Multimedia_Inte...

Yes. The previous 8 cables were high speed HDMI 1.3, and the new ones HDMI 1.4. Wikipedia says "High Speed HDMI 1.3 cables can support all HDMI 1.4 features except for the HDMI Ethernet Channel". To my knowledge, the receiver doesn't support that particular feature and neither does the Optimum STB.

In any cases, whatever caused this issue, I agree with the body of the article that not all HDMI cables are the same. The headline does a disservice.

Never ceases to amaze me how the cheapest HDMI cable in any brick and mortar store I've ever seen is $30. You'd think if people found out that a store would sell them for just $10-15 that people would flock there due to the relatively cheap price.

$4 with 2 day shipping off of Amazon and (of course) it works perfectly.

One thing I don't understand, which the article just mentions in passing...

What is the difference between "high-speed" HDMI cables and standard cables? Are high-speed cables worth the extra money?

High-speed cables are certified to run at the full HDMI bandwidth (allowing 3D, high-bit-depth color, higher resolution, etc.), while standard-speed cables only carry standard 8-bit-per-channel RGB or YUV data at 1080p or lower (source: comparison between [1] and [2]). On Monoprice, high-speed cables aren't significantly more expensive, so one should always buy the high-speed cable.

[1] High speed cable: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&c...

[2] Standard speed cable: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&c...

Not all cables are the same, even in the digital domain. Cheap metals, shielding, high resistance wire and stray capacitance can change the shape of the signal, increase noise and increase losses.

What goes in doesn't always come out the same and cheap shitty poorly filtered equipment on each end makes it worse (PS3, Vaios, low-end Bravias etc - yes I'm complaining about Sony here).

However the problems go away immediately at the $10 price point.

I'd only buy an expensive cable if I was going to require extra mechanical strength i.e. if it was being plugged and unplugged regularly, much as you should always buy decent oscilloscope probes.

On a side-note, as an ex-EE I've seen some crazy shit going on with cables before. The worst being a $1500 RF cable that ran 4 inches between two bits of avionic equipment and carried 455KHz IF (nothing particularly sensitive or reliable that a $15 cable would have sufficed).

Did you even read the article? The point is that the only difference for HDMI cables is the price. Either you get signal or you don't. So you're probably fine for a 3ft cable for less than $10.

Yes and it's definitely not that straightforward. "Digital cables" are actually "analogue cables" with two discrete voltage levels or a modulated signal carried upon them. They vary in reliability quite considerably due to transmission line characteristics and distortion related to that.

If they were boolean with respect to working, they wouldn't need filters and amplifiers on each end or checksums sent over them.

You buy a cable. There 'would' be rusting. There 'would' be oxidation of conductor.

$5 cable would be that way in 20-40 weeks.

$50 would be there in longer, because the conductor (of the connector specifically ) is different. Gold plated ones last longer, also the quality of the gold plating matters.

They don't matter when they are new.

Many of the cheap cables are gold plated as well, including those from Monoprice.

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