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Just bought an HD ready TV which came with a free Blu-ray player 😀
But need a cable. The assistant in Currys was trying to sell me a 'buy for the future, all singing all dancing beasty for £79.99............surely not!!
Want to have the quality picture and all, but do I need to find that much cash?
the gadget show compared a expensive one against a fiver one, no difference.
Buy a cheap one, its a pure digital signal so doesn't degrade
they're all the same, just buy the cheapest one of the length you need.
Excellent........could tell by the hard sell just to take TV + Blu-ray and leave with a smile 🙂
Will look around for one on the web.........
Cheers
its digital so surely it'll either work or not. i ran a couple of 15 meter e-bay specials and they both work fine (just as well as they are buried into walls and floors now!
I got one for £1.21 posted on ebay. Works a treat.
Tesco do a £9.48 one, gold and all that carry on, makes my blue ray player, via hdmi 7.2 amp to HD telly look ok.
Seriously I have spent ages on AV Forums and those guys rave about them.
[url= http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.204-2508.aspx ]tesco hdmi linky thing[/url]
righty, just sorted out my log in so i can comment on this.
is your tv system complex? are you splitting out to any devices other than what you have mentioned?
what you said about digital either getting there is partly rubbish, yes it is a digital signal, but, at the speed at which 1080X data travels, the wiring is used moreso as a waveguide as opposed to a traditional wire in the terms of what we're used to.
so, down this hdmi cable goes the signal for audio, video, clock sync, handshaking protocol, 5v and some other bits i cant remember right now, think of it this way, if you have a cat5e cable and don't obey the guidlines for the twisted pair and you want to run full duplex gigabit you wont reach that speed. the same applies to hdmi.
as an example, today we went out to a job where occasionally the screen had a purple hue, why? cheapy hdmi cable. £100 lighter and now all is good (ok, its a 10m cable) another job, the image had artifacts and other apparant signal degredation issues 'sparklies' (as they're known) for the same reason, we buy a 'monster' branded cable at £100 or so and it cures the issues the customer has put up with.
Yes, you can use a low-cost cable, but we find we have problems with them, not all the time, but occasionally.
apologies for bad english, its late and i'm tapping on here instead of sleeping.
I'm not saying you shouldnt use cheap cables (people do and they work) just giving a little insight as to why good cables cost more - because they are made to a tighter tolerance, which will be of greater importance when hdmi version 1.4 is rolled out / ratified / whatever.
apologies if my tone is a little curt, really tired but plenty of work to do 😉
jt
just to quantify what i've said, have a quick skim over this, while we were at cedia a few weeks back, i spent some time with the dude with the test kit... interesting stuff for me at least
http://gizmodo.com/268788/the-truth-about-monster-cable-part-2-verdict-cheap-cables-keep-upusually
geeky indeed 😉
So if your TV is at the other side of the house your HD source then spend good money if not then a cheap one is fine.
TV is on a drawer unit with Blu-ray, Sky HD + DVD player with surround speakers all directly below say 1m or so. Unit is quite high.
cable needed from Blu-ray to TV approx. 1.2m long.
Cheap or expensive?
Amazon doing a gold plated one reduced from £25 to £7.50 🙂
Similar set up to me. Ebay is your friend!
Well according to Jontawn cheap one is fine, unless you have King Kong's drawer unit.
get down to tesco
Thats an interesting article, have they done anything similar with any of the following (all seem to be debated in hi-fi mags/forums)
- directional cables (100% not convinced)
- bi-wired speekers (yes if your running several amps, after the crossover, otherwise no, i.e in a PA system, not hi-fi)
- different CD's (i see your logic, same as the cable test above, digital is not "1 and 0" , its "anything above this is 1, below this is 0")
People who talk about digital cable quality affecting picture performance are talking nonsense! It's like discussing "snake oil" - check out Russ Andrews website for pages and pages of unparalleled twaddle.
Digital data transmission is all ones and noughts and dropped bits get made up by parity checking. Any quality of cable will work. Some may drop bits, but parity always takes care of it.
Make sure you get a cable with good screening, gold plated connectors, but don't pay much more than a tenner.
If you want an analogue interconnect, or speaker cable, then there are significant differences between types. It's not an exact science and experimentation is the only way to find out. I was a big sceptic until my local Audio-T lent me some hugely expensive speaker cables. To my surprise, they made a big difference. The price tag was just silly and I could not justify the expense, but they were awesome.
To be pedantic, it's not a waveguide, but is, assuming it uses twisted pairs or appropriate construction, a transmission line (a waveguide's a type of transmission line).
If the cable is poorly designed, then yes, you'll get rubbish results, and the longer the cable the more likely you'll see that - I imagine there's no certification requirements on cables. But if it's short you'll probably be able to use the cheapest available. A better connector *might* give you a more consistent connection, but it's a bit academic if the connector in the player/tv/whatever is cheap n cheerful.
(FWIW, yup, it's 1's and 0's, but these have to be sampled at the receive end, with the clock the sent over the cable. On a poor/long cable there'll be more signal degradation/time delay between signals in the same cable than on a short/better one, if it bad enough the 1's and 0's will be sampled incorrectly. If anyone's that interested I'll wander off from hassling some USB simulations and dig some specs out...)
>not an exact science
Well, science and engineering, so I'd say measuring the effects, at least, is exact, tho' what your brain picks up is a little subjective. Tho' people seem to want to convince themselves that spending more than a nominal amount on (cheap) decent quality speaker wire works wonders. I'm genuiniely curious as to what the difference was between the cables you tried.
Same thing with bloomin' guitar amps/effects - there's an awful ot lot rubbish spoken about them..if you can't measure/quantify why it sounds better I think there's a bit of self-delusion going on..
(And no, I can't be arsed arguing about it, I'm sure it's been done numerous times elsewhere).
Hope I haven't put anyone to sleep 😉
[url= http://www.tvcables.co.uk ]tvcables.co.uk[/url]
buy the cheapest one that's the right length. enjoy.
My brother in-law who is a big Hi-Fi nut brought round a range of HDMI cables for me to try on out new LCD (Sony W404000) linking up a PS3.
Now I am sure PS3 is not the best Blu-Ray player and I am sure there are better TV out there too, but we could not spot the difference between a £10 and £200 cable while watching a blu-Ray movie back.
But he did take his time tinkering with the TV settings, not sure what exactly, but it all looked a bit beyond me, anyway, that did make a difference after he had "tuned it in" from the default setting.
[i]Now I am sure PS3 is not the best Blu-Ray player[/i]
Actually it's one of the better ones.
The test article above kind of proves the point, look at what they had to use to try and prove cheap one don't work as well. Surly the best test would be like for like TVs and blu-ray players all ined up using different cables, much more realistic than a bunch of nerds in a lab.
i'm using the longest HDMI cable tesco sell to connect my Laptop to my TV and produces a perfect picture.