Hdmi Cables$$$$$

[rubiconpoor]

Does anyone know where you can buy some HDMI cables at a reasonable price???

[CLYDE]

search around online,, remember that hdmi is a digital signal, and that even cheapie cable is as good as the 200 dollar monster cable is. they make bank on selling you crap ya dont need.

[mikee_357]

i got one for free for ya,

[rubiconpoor]

Mikee, are you here or in SD? I would be willing to accept your offer if you are here in town since they are going to install this Sunday. I noticed you have a JK, how do you like it? I sold my 04 rubi for a new JK rubi last June. I like it, can't wait to actually wheel it.
Dane

[rubiconpoor]

Clyde, thanks for the info. I can't believe the prices on the cables. So cheap is good.

[not so Quikjeep]

What are you getting installed? I carry them on my truck and get em for free if you can make it up to the north end I'll hook you up.

-Tom

[CLYDE]

hey no problem, I hate seeing people get ripped off.

[mikee_357]

Mikee, are you here or in SD? I would be willing to accept your offer if you are here in town since they are going to install this Sunday. I noticed you have a JK, how do you like it? I sold my 04 rubi for a new JK rubi last June. I like it, can't wait to actually wheel it.
Dane

live here in littleton, the deadwood was for my wild bill avatar,

[XJRegen]

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10240

[bsaunder]

search around online,, remember that hdmi is a digital signal, and that even cheapie cable is as good as the 200 dollar monster cable is. they make bank on selling you crap ya dont need.

there are crap cables out there that have cross talk between the lines etc - I wouldn't run a $5 cable, but a good $20-$50 cable will probably work just as well or better than the monster cable. Just because it's digital doesn't mean you can't screw it up, we are talking about fairly high speed signals and signal integrity can very much be an issue.

[CLYDE]

I have yet to see a 5 dollar hdmi cable tho:D I do have one high dollar one, and one as cheap as I could find, and there is no difference between the signal quality that I can tell.

[Jeffro600]

An HDMI cable is an HDMI cable...no reason to shell out the money for a high dollar one. If you want it now and cant wait, Wally World is going to be your best option most likely. I got a 6 footer for like 15 bucks a few months ago and it works just fine. You can get them online for cheaper but by the time you pay shipping and wait for it, you might have well jsut spent the extra few bucks.

[Budman]

I bought one downtown at the Electronics Mart for $9. It is 5 Meters long.

[bsaunder]

An HDMI cable is an HDMI cable...


I'll just say it one more time and then quit wasting my breath - no they are not. You are transferring a 4.4Gbps signal when working at 1080i resolution, add in HDMI v1.3 audio and they are currently passing data at 8.8Gbps - with some of the newer advancements in Blu-ray, they will be hitting 12+Gbps very soon. To effectively transfer at that rate, signal integrity is very important - wire quality is part of it, but routing of wires in respect to each other and shielding around them become a more and more critical issue as the rates go up.
Its like saying an eSATA cable is an eSATA cable - yea, any type will work, but if you benchmark a device attached to it you will see that the crappy cables will give you up to 80% less performance - and if you are using a modern SATA II hard drive, that is only at 3MBps. For those that know SCSI, would you use a generic SCSI cable to attach to a u320 device? no - because you will have many data integrity issues - and yes, all the above is digital signals.

A "for example" - the HDMI cable that came with my comcast hd box, works pretty well when used on just the box, if I have it set to 1080p and don't pass audio through it. I start getting pixilization if I kick up any of the data rates - put a better cable on it and there are no issues and the blues get a whole lot deeper. Try comcast cable on my blu-ray player and I get lots of issues with not just pixilzation, but also blocking and shadowing as it has signal integrity issues - but a better cable on and the issues go away. For that matter I had some of the same issues with the "stock" Tivo S3 cable - unfortunately most OEM bundled peripherals are just barely above the crap line as far as quality, but they "work" at the lowest cost possible for them.

now what is a good cable - unfortunately that is hard to tell as there is a lot of snake oil out there - the monoprice stuff seems to be good quality as does A&R (if you can find a shop that doesn't mark it up 200% like ultimate). Monster stuff is way over rated and over priced - if for some reason you want to shell out that kind of money, get an audioquest or kimber as they actually are high quality, but are overkill for the general user. If the cable is ~1/8" in diameter - it will probably work on 720 resolution, but once you start going higher rates, then it will not have enough shielding or trace separation.

yes - a lot of it depends on what kind of AV system you are using, what resolution you are using, and what your source is.

[Colo.TJ]

Found a guy on craigslist selling them very reasonably.

[stewp97]

I love this comment from Blue Jeans Cable:

HDMI is a digital signal format, developed primarily as a platform for the implementation of HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) to prevent consumers from having complete access to the contents of high-definition digital recordings. As one might expect from a standard that was developed to serve the content provider industries, rather than the best interests of the consumer, HDMI is something of a mess. The signal is not robust over distance because it was designed to run balanced when it should have been run unbalanced (SDI, the commercial digital video standard, can be run hundreds of feet over a single coax without any performance issues); the HDMI cable is an unnecessarily-complicated rat's-nest arrangement involving nineteen conductors; switches, repeaters and distribution amplifiers, by virtue of this complicated scheme, are made unnecessarily expensive; and the HDMI plug is prone to falling out of the jack with little more than a light tug. As more and more manufacturers move to implement HDMI on more home theater devices, however, it falls to the consumer to try to make the best of this dubious and poorly-thought-out standard.BTW, I bought a few HDMI cables from them recently and am very happy with them. I run them on my PS3 and DirecTV receivers and have had no issues.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/hdmi-cables/index.htm

peter

[Eryl Flynn]

HDMI cables carry a digital signal. The only time I would suggest a higher end cable is for long runs.

To put this in perspective, a T1 is a digital signal, you can use T1 cable and yes it is suggested. T1 cable has the transmit and receive pairs shielded from each other. You can also use UTP (untwisted pair) cabling, but the catch is that the distance of the run drops by at least half.

The reason for this is relative signal strength. As the Blue Jeans Cables quote stated, the standard was designed with a balanced signal in mind, but you only get that with short runs. The longer the run the more unbalanced the signal is. In the T1 world what you get is a signal induced into the other cable that can interfere with the receive side.

HDMI is similiar but no the same. Mostly it is a 1 way signal, but because it wants to verify the device on the other side, it needs to receive a signal back. This is where a problem can come in. That signal could be broken down when it gets back to the sending device and cause it to not send a video signal as it can not validate the remote device. It also can cause the picture to have drop outs due to the validation signal interfering with the incoming picture and audio signal.

What this means to you and me is that the cable pretty much either works or it doesn't. If you buy a cheaper one and hook it up and you get a picture, odds are you won't have any issues. If you hook it up and the picture won't come in, or drops out. Your run is too long for the cable and it's minimal or lack of shielding. Most of the time a cheap cable is fine.

[Jeffro600]

You guys can bash cheap cables with all your mumbo jumbo all you want...all i know is that my 15 dollar Phillips HDMI cable looks every bit as good as my friends 150 dollar Monster one.