What HDMI lead do I need for an XBox 360 then? Man in Currys clearly on drugs when he said I *must* have a £70 one. I walked away.

Any advice welcome, *surely* they aren't that expensive?? There are some for less than a tenner online, are they just as good?

just get a cheap one

there's been a couple of very heated threads on here recently regarding similar

The the one that came with my £30 dvd player from lidl seems ok, on both the 360 and the dvd player. I cant believe what they try to charge for them!

Surly HDMI cables are all the same. Analogue cables are advertised as reducing signal degradation – the better the conductors the less loss. A digital signal will not suffer this – so all should transmit the signal as good as the next one

cheap one with a sky hd box is as good as a £70 one.

Right you are – thanks for the re-assurance!

Are they directional though? 😉

Are they directional though?

Don't know but the man did say not to have any bends in the cable. The zeros will go round the corners but the ones will get stuck…

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/hi-fi-cable-directional-are-they-taking-the-pss

This is a tricky subject. Depending on who you listen to, you could think that a metre or so of cable would be fine if it was made from OK copper strands. Or, you could be persuaded that you need virgin-spun oxygen free copper sintered in the fires of hell and purified with the blood of first borns.

Over time, I've tried a few different kinds of leads for analog from £2.99 TESCO specials (avoid) to £60 Monsters with a few in between. If you're connecting your speakers or analog linked equipment then a more expensive cable makes a difference…to a point. Your mileage may vary.

For digital, anyone who says you will get a noticeable quality difference for your 1080p xbox games over a metre or two of HDMI cable between an Amazon £5 lead and a fancy £100 lead probably also believes in homeopathy and other quaint things like santa and the easter bunny.

The Fisual cables, and no doubt similar ones, on Amazon work fine. I've tested several cables with my Sony TV and PS3 and these are OK. I noticed no difference between these and far more expensive cables.

£5 Fisual 1.5m cable duly ordered… Thank you, sir. 🙂

re: uplink. Love the Kimber link. 'a vast soundstage'. LOL.

Why didn't I like the TESCO specials? It's just that really cheap cables often have ropey soldering, thin (breakable) insulation and easily bent connectors. Take a step up (to a few quid) and the cable becomes a bit more robust and handles bending, tugging and 'robust handling' a little better. And it is still relatively cheap to replace. Totally practical reasons. I suspect that TESCO's copper is much like anyone else's.

re: munkster. Hope it works out OK for you. They delivered my cables faster than expected. I can't believe the Curry's salesperson didn't try & offer to 'align your chakras' at the same time. If it had been me I would have tried to interest you in additional games and a warranty. Ah, those were the days… I wonder what the bonuses are for warranty or store card deals these days.

Ha ha ha ha. I looked a little further at the Russ Andrews site and saw this: Kimber 'focus rings' So, spend anything from £100 to £100,000 on speakers and be assured that a couple of felt rings will make up for the engineer's inadequacies. Let's think about that. Imagine the poor speaker engineer at home one night. Recent top rated speaker whizzing out of the factory and a quick look at the 'focus rings' and 'blimey! I forgot all about high frequency reflections from the tweeter. Darn!'.

Over a metre or so, no difference at all. If I was putting cable through a wall for a projector and going 10m or so I'd probably splash out a bit more just because there's more scope for degredation/interference and it's a ballache if the connectors go dodgy. But for something under your TV? If you pay double figures you're a mug.

The one I use for my PS3 was about £2.50 and does the job just fine.

The fisual ones on Amazon are great. Not the absolute cheapest, but are of good quality. I use their HDMI and also their optical cables on the PS3, DVD and Sky HD box.

Cheap Scart cables were notorious for not having all pins connected. No idea if this is the same for HDMI cables, but I guess it's possible.

Was in a John Lewis (?) in Manchester a few years back when we saw a pair of dinky Bose speakers that sounded absolutely fantastic, and even better, were only £50 each.

We duly snapped our fingers at the salesman and said we'd like the £50 speakers, at which point he coughed politely and explained that the wall brackets were £50, and the speakers were something insane like £300. Never lived that one down.

Just use cheapies here have one good one and there is no difference at all in the quality, IIRC the only person who supported for them being better was the guy who sold them for living. Can't think why he'd suggest the expensive ones are better. 😀

A digital signal will not suffer this

Why not? All digital signals are analogue by nature anyway.

In perfect conditions with perfect equipment £70 leads will be a degree better than cheaper ones. But none of us ever have those conditions or (generally) any real way of making direct comparisons. I would never, ever spend that amount of money on cables.

occasionally the argument of 'its digital it won't make a difference' comes up. Well, it can. If there was no such thing as signal degredation on a digital link, sky wouldn't go funny when there's a storm, and there'd be no need for ECC in networking protocols. It doesn't make as much of a difference as on an analog cable, but it does make some. For my money, buy cheap but not the cheapest.

But none of us ever have those conditions or (generally) any real way of making direct comparisons.

I do 8) I have little or no interest in video though 😀 Actually, aren't there a few AV installers on here? They're the people most likely to have experience. Christ, This is another cable thread isn't it 🙄

Why not? All digital signals are analogue by nature anyway.

because the signal only has to be one or zero, and even if heavily attenuated it's easy to detect the difference.

with perfect equipment £70 leads will be a degree better than cheaper ones

a degree ? Celcius or Fahrenheit ??

. It doesn't make as much of a difference as on an analog cable, but it does make some.

the difference being that when too much signal is lost you get nothing at all. It either works perfectly, or it doesn't work, though right at the margin you may get rapid intermittance.

because the signal only has to be one or zero, and even if heavily attenuated it's easy to detect the difference.

Ohh how how wrong

a degree ? Celcius or Fahrenheit ??

no, he probably means a degree, you know like those things you measure angles with, and waves, you know, the wave that is waht a digital signal looks like when you hook an oscilascope upto a hdmi cable?

the difference being that when too much signal is lost you get nothing at all. It either works perfectly, or it doesn't work, though right at the margin you may get rapid intermittance.

which is precicely why you need expensive cables for long runs :p

you know like those things you measure angles with

ah, phase ? That doesn't really make sense for impulse signals which are synthesised from numerous different frequency sine waves

Digital transmission is either broken or it is not – i.e. if the signal gets through sufficiently to be detected 100% of the time, it doesnt matter if it was transmitted down strands of spider silk or solid gold ingots, it'll be reproduced the same at the other end. If your spider silk is SO bad that the highs and lows are indistinguishable the signal will come out as junk at the other end (and most systems counter this by ignoring the info altogether).

What SFB was saying is that as long as there is a noticable difference between the high and the low state and there are no stray spikes caused by noise sources, the quality of the cable matters not, the electronics will deal with it. A £5 cable with decent shielding will be fine. The signal will come out the same, it won't suffer degredation and you'll not know any difference. This isn't a case of "my directional cables are ace, you just can't hear the difference" – this is a measurable, scientifically establishable identicality in output. Analogue signals can be attenuated by poor cabling and suffer some odd changes, digital signals get those changes too, but the encoding of the data ensures that the content of the data is not changed by the quality of the signal.

A simple example is digital TV – watch your digital TVs signal strength bar on a channel – even on the ones that are right down to 25% the picture is identical to when it is 100%, it's only when it drops really really low that you get problems, and then you get corruption of the image.

I bought mine from here:
http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_5&products_id=105194

£3 inc delivery. 🙂

"A digital signal will not suffer this"

actually, capacitance on the cable will hack away at the trailing and leading edges of the waveform,(you're not actually sending 0's and 1's, it's a nominally square wave that represents 0's and 1's, being sent in an analogue format.) making it less square and eventually it will begin to look like an analogue wave if is enough capacitance is introduced, thus confusing the digital to analogue converter as to what is is actually receiving, whether or not you can tell the difference is a different issue all together though.

actually, capacitance on the cable will hack away at the trailing and leading edges of the waveform,(you're not actually sending 0's and 1's, it's a nominally square wave that represents 0's and 1's, being sent in an analogue format.) making it less square and eventually it will begin to look like an analogue wave if is enough capacitance is introduced,

Yeah, but I bet you'd need a blooming long cable before you got to a level where the edges were actually not clear enough so that you actually got data loss. We have 50m cable runs for gigabit ethernet, and I can tell you they don't use super-fancy gold plated connectors on the end of those, you chop the ends and crimp on plastic jobbies every time. Okay the data rate is about a 3rd or 4th of 1080p video, but I'm betting at least for 5 metres of so, you could use pretty much any old junk as long as the ends stay on.

You'd also know if you had interference – error correction in video generally is pretty poor.

Joe

thus confusing the digital to analogue converter as to what is is actually receiving, whether or not you can tell the difference is a different issue all together though.

It's much more complicated than that. The data is transferred in packets with error correction, and will never get the the D/A's unless received correctly

oh yeah, we used to run up to .5 kilometer before we expected to see any problems, and that was using un-screened alarm cable, my point is simply that digital signals can degrade but that it's rarely an issue

for short distances there will be no noticeable (or indeed measurable) difference in quality.

more money will get you better build quality up to a point

longer distances are where cable capacitance becomes an issue.

Digital signals are not some infallible magic form of transmission, it's all very well saying it's just 0s and 1s but it is an awful lot of them, very close together.

Personally I have no experience of how HDMI (or DVI) transmits it's data but i'd imagine there will be several forms of error correction which will allow for 'x' amount of data loss, probably making up for the lost data by averaging of some kind. There will be a defined point where the error correction gives up and you lose picture all together.

If we have to send DVI more than 3 meters we use fibre optic, nothing else will cope although DVI over CAT5 is starting to appear. HDMI is able to cope with slightly longer distances.

as an aside, are all HDMI cables the same in terms of connector interfaces?

My mum wants to buy an "HDMI" DVD player for her Sony HD TV, then get some HDMI cables for it (as they dont come with the player).

If I get, say, those 7dayshop ones, there's no chance I could accidentally end up with one that wont fit is there?

actually, capacitance on the cable will hack away at the trailing and leading edges of the waveform,(you're not actually sending 0's and 1's, it's a nominally square wave that represents 0's and 1's, being sent in an analogue format.)

Yes, but in digital signals the communication is "clocked" – the period during which each bit should be found is known, meaning you can identify a bit as a 0 or a 1 within that given timeframe, even if there is ringing and serious ramping on the signals at both ends. Add to that the fact that there is error correction transmitted too, you're looking at an all-or-nothing solution, distortion does not come into it with digital.

"Yes, but in digital signals the communication is "clocked" – the period during which each bit should be found is known, meaning you can identify a bit as a 0 or a 1 within that given timeframe, even if there is ringing and serious ramping on the signals at both ends. "

yup, I agree completely, that's exactly why I said "whether or not you can tell the difference is a different issue all together though. "

It's much more complicated than that. The data is transferred in packets with error correction, and will never get the the D/A's unless received correctly

Yeah but when an error is detected then the packet may need to be re-sent. You can only re-send a certain number of packets in any given time frame so there is a point where even with error correction, not every tile will have complete information.

To me it seems that digital cables either work or they don't, but my mate bought a pricey cable for his HD projector and he swears it gives him 'deeper blacks' 😕

The hifi mags seem to agree with him.