Thursday 6 January 2011

Do not pay more for premium HDMI cables

You should never, ever pay more for a "high quality" HDMI cable. Here's why. In the days of analogue signals, high-quality cables made a difference. A shoddy cable might introduce a certain amount of noise into the signal, delivering only, say, 80% quality. That 20% signal loss would translate directly to poorer audio or video, because there's less signal to work with.

HDMI, however, delivers a digital signal, which can stand up to 49% signal degradation with no loss of quality whatsoever. So while a high-quality cable might manage 99% signal fidelity, and a cheap cable only 60%, these two cables will sound and look identical in the end. The only difference will be the amount of cash left in your wallet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The difference between digital and analogue is no contest.
PPS - As you'd know if you've compared them.

2 comments:

Stu said...

It's so easy to get 2metre HDMI cables for about $5 these days which are great compared to the $200 "Gold-plated" ones

John said...

Exactly. And the sum total of the difference between those two cables is just the money - $195.