Bah

I used to work for Currys and can attest to the high mark-up on cables (Monster stuff only came in later). Of course in my day it was SCART leads so perhaps the same argument doesn't quite apply, but I distinctly remember being told that we made no money on some TVs if we "failed" to sell a £13-20 cable along with them. Also, did you know they used to put different letters on the tickets to indicate to the sales people which items had the most margin on them? Scoundrels!

parents

My dad came back with a £35 HDMI once. He was dead happy with the quality increase it provided, as it allowed him to upscale. I didn't have the heart to tell him he overpaid by probably three times.

I always help them out if they have questions, but the expensive digital cable is a completely false economy. Unfortunately he is still stuck in the analogue age, where it actually did make a difference.

HDMI at John Lewis

Well, a quick squizz through the John Lewis website brings up a handful of cables ranging from £15 to £60. Couldn't see any for £100 (although they may be available in store).

TBH, if I was peddling something like plastic tea cups, I'd probably paint some of them red and charge a premium for 'Executive Tea Cups'. If someone wants to pay the cash then I'll let them (you pay your money and takes yer choice, and all that).

FTR my HDMI cable came free with something and works fine.

*sigh*

It DOES make a difference. A big difference! Allow me to explain:

Cheap cables use thinner wires to transfer the data. These thinner wires produce a tighter radius curve when they get bent through dangling behind your telly.

Data is made up of 1s and 0s. The 0s can move freely due to their curved nature, but the angled edges of the 1s get stuck in the tighter radius of the thinner wires.

Therefore, you get a buildup of data and subsequently a congestion of 1s in your wires.

This is why processors have burst caches. The tracks on the motherboards are too sharply angled and the cache builds up to bursting point and a "burst cache" relieves the pressure.

Same with cables. So unless you want cables to explode and litter your room with EM interferring 1s, I suggest you buy expensive, thicker diameter cables.

Mines the one with the PC world application in the pocket :-)

(yes, it's a joke)

Ozzie ripoff

The cable ripoff is well and truly present in Oz as well. With retailers cutting their margins and offering (usually the same) low price on audio/video equipment, they like to sell massively overpriced cables.

I was amazed that Dick Smith Electronics was doing this, and I found it really hard to find good value cables anywhere. I promised to send my in-laws some cables from the UK.

Then I noticed that Maplin were into this overpriced cables thing too over here. Fortunately CPC are good for cheap cables: http://www.cpc.co.uk and I have a trade account

:)

£100 cable vs £10 cable?

£3 eBay cable FTW. And don't get me started on hi-fi interconnects; there may be some justification when you're dealing with a weak phono signal, but a one-volt line level signal over a very short piece of copper isn't going to be noticeably degraded by a cheap interconnect. As long as the plugs are properly connected, anyway.

There is a vague justification for half-decent speaker cable as thin bell wire can suppress bass frequencies, but the sort of 99.999999% pure, hand-rolled on the thighs of Swedish virgins stuff you can pay £30,000 for is about as honest as a 419 scam.

Maplin

When I worked there years ago, the old EPOS system had a "hidden" menu option where you could see the buy price of products (any other Maploids remember this?)

At the time they were selling IXUS Gold-Plated Serial cables. Yes, you heard right - 9 pin serial cables, over which you'll get a max data rate of either 115kbps or 320kbps depending on the UART chip, but with gold plating.

They sold these for £29.99.

The buy price? 72p.

Get your facts straight everyone!

I've never read such a load of old tosh about cheap HDMI cables being the same as expensive ones. When I raised an eyebrow at 70 quid for an HDMI cable in PC World a very knowledgable you man explained to me that they were for 'HD'. Cheaper and therefore inferior cables available elsewhere 'err... aren't'.

That's that settled then.

cheap and not so cheerful?

I can buy a decent 1m HDMI cable with gold plated connectors from a respectable online store for £2.

Shame more people don't know this and get charged over £10 in shops.

A 1m 3.5mm stereo lead to connect your music player to your car stereo can be had for 80p and yet the high street shops still sells these for £8!

Amazing isn't it?

Ho hum

The argument that "10110" is "10110" is only part of the story. There's slew rate, ringing, over-shoot and under-shoot.

Why do digital signals become unusable at some particular distance? Look up 'capacitance per metre' of cables. Now imagine a length that works but with a different capacitance. It's simple really.

When you have multiple signals in parallel, including differential signals, and they all need to sync-up it's even more important - "10" then "01" sent in parallel is not the same as "10", "00" and if one signal lags the rest by enough that's what the receiver can get.

I don't disagree that a cheap but reasonable cable will often be equal to a ridiculously priced cable, but expensive == good, cheap == crap, isn't necessarily the case, and to say all cables will be equal and will work just as well in the digital domain simply is not true.

Blatant trolling :)

The thing we are all forgetting is that obviously an expensive Apple branded cable is beter than anything!

Troll grenade dropped and running away.................

@AC 14:49 "Ho Hum"

Not just hum, but general noise as well. The domestic electrical environment is getting increasingly polluted by various sources of wideband electrical noise. Usually these things are unintentionally emitting as an unintended or ill-suppressed side effect, such as yer typical cheap switched mode power supply. On the other hand, powerline Ethernet is polluting by design. But moving on...

In lots of cases the local RF environment won't be of any consequence.

Sometimes, in some marginal cases, it might matter. It'll start to get increasingly important as more folks have things like HDMI switches which will likely degrade the end to end signal quality.

Anyway, didn't we have this whole discussion back in January:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/01/13/russ_accessories/

Back then someone kindly posted a link to a company that's done some quantitative analysis on the qualitative aspects of HDMI cabling:

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/belden-hdmi-update.htm

Enjoy.

I'll stick to pound shop quality!

@Ho-Hum

Quote:

The argument that "10110" is "10110" is only part of the story. There's slew rate, ringing, over-shoot and under-shoot.

Why do digital signals become unusable at some particular distance? Look up 'capacitance per metre' of cables. Now imagine a length that works but with a different capacitance. It's simple really.

OK:

Now look up 'Transmission line' -

Capacitance per metre is closely linked with characteristic impedance; it does not cause distortion of the signal.

Slew-rate is primarily a characteristic of the Driver, not the cable.

Ringing and overshoot occur with un-terminated connections, not propertly matched transmission lines.

The ONLY relevent characteristic of a balanced digital transmission line is the attenuation; the signal at the receiver must be a suitable amount above the receiver threshold levels.

As others have said, dirt cheap CAT5e cable is rated for 100m per leg with each pair rated to 350 MHz. Cost of the cable itself is in no way a major factor in the selling price

The attenuation of any normal HDMI cable is trivial, over those distances any moderate quality paired cable should work.

Any argument that cable quality can cause subtle changes on a digital link are ludicrous.

If anyone is in doubt - try very slowly pulling an optical cable out of it's socket while you are playing music through it and see what happens when a digital signal degrades below the receiver threshold.

It is in no way subtle, so watch your speakers & eardrums!

"cable quality can['t] cause subtle changes on a digital link"

"Any argument that cable quality can cause subtle changes on a digital link are ludicrous."

Are they?

I know nothing about how the HDMI signals are encoded but if I were writing a spec for the transmission of audiovisual signals over a medium which may sometimes struggle to supply the necessary bandwidth in an error-free way, I'd do something a bit smarter than (say) Manchester encoding or Turbo codes or whatever other mechanisms are traditionally used when all the bits of data are equally important.

With HDMI, given that we know what the signal in question is being used for, I'd ensure that stuff was encoded and error protected in a way that gave the MS bits of the data a lot more robustness than the LS bits, because people will be less likely to notice the errors in the LS bits, especially as (afaik) there are no error counters anywhere in an HDMI setup so punters can confirm whether or not their "digital" transmissions are error free.

Obviously this isn't the same way you'd encode a classical Ethernet frame or disk block or DSL frame, where all bits are equal (and where error counters are almost always an important part of the setup).

You still sure there's no room, no room at all, for "subtle effects"?