HDMI Cable comparisons

FWIW, I tried both the economy (28AWG @ $3.96) as well as the thicker gauge(24AWG), higher cost HDMI 1.3a compliant monoprice cable and have to give my nod to the later. Better color saturation, richer, better contrast. Plus it's only $6.97 for a 3ft. Also, if for nothing else, it's much better built and looks the part with a nice mesh jacket. YMMV.

Best,

Kenobi

09-30-08: Pictura
The British What Hi-Fi Sound and Vision magazine has an extensive review of cables including video cables. ... I have experience with component video cables before and I can say that there is an improvement over the original cables that come with the electronics. I am using the Monster Cable Video 3 Component now. I also use a PS Audio Ultimate Outlet for my TV and DVD player and the colors are definitely richer. The best thing to do is to borrow a few cables at different price points and make a value judgement. The Pioneer Elite plasma is a very good plasma. You should be able to see a difference between the cables. You also need a top notch Blu-ray player to get the best out from the Elite.

Anybody can see the difference in component cables. What's interesting in my experience is that when switching to an HDMI upconverting player, the picture is better through a $20 HDMI cable than through a $250 set of component cables.

09-30-08: Kenk168
FWIW, I tried both the economy (28AWG @ $3.96) as well as the thicker gauge(24AWG), higher cost HDMI 1.3a compliant monoprice cable and have to give my nod to the later. Better color saturation, richer, better contrast. Plus it's only $6.97 for a 3ft.

Well, that's understandable. You need at least an acceptable level of mechanical and materials build quality. But would a 2M $375 AudioQuest HDMI-3 be worth the money?

Blindjim: Marantz *does* offer a $2000 Blu-ray player with HDMI output, though I suspect you're talking about much higher priced components. It's not that HDMI is a "mid-fi" interface. It hasn't shown up on the megabuck components because most of them have much longer R&D times to bring something to market. They couldn't afford to "bet the farm" on one format of HD disc over another. The big companies like Onkyo, Sony, Marantz, etc. could throw more people and development money at an HDMI-based product than the smaller upper high end companies can. They'll get around to it eventually.

What ever brand make sure 1.3 compliant for deep color, high speed.

Don't waste money on an expensive HDMI cable...

My Bachelor degree is in Computer Science with a specialization in networking; this included studying electrical signals and their propagation along electrical lines. Passing signals across HDMI is a form of handshake networking.

I can assure you different cables will not change the video or audio quality of a digital signal, especially since the signal is buffered into memory along the way. When a signal is buffered it is stored temporarily in a cache memory as a charge then re-propagated again to be transmitted somewhere else or to be processed into analog. To sum up, the cable just carries the digital bitstream signal temporarily and the signal is reformed at the other end. So basically even if something was happening to the signal in-between, it would be completely taken out of the bitstream in the rebuffering process...

The digital signal passing is also an all or nothing proposition. If the cable were malfunctioning past the point of error correction, the signal would stop working completely.

People who think they are hearing and seeing differences with different types of digital signal cables are suffering from the placebo effect. Don't believe the bologna...