Is it all the same or is Monster cable 1000 worth the $30-$40?
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School me on HDMI cable
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A $8 Monoprice cable will yield the same results as a $40 Best Buy Monster cable. In fact, how about a $12 cable vs. $200 cable. http://www.tested.com/tech/3329-the-...e-hdmi-cables/
And ignore the 1.x/2.0 specs. You either have low speed or high speed.
The only issue might arise over long cable throws, but that's what Cat5e/6 HDMI extenders are for.
The science behind why it would be foolish to ever spend more than a $10 bill on a HDMI cable.
The signal
The first thing to understand is what's transmitted over the cable in the first place. HDMI uses Transition Minimized Differential Signaling, or TMDS.
TMDS has two basic aspects. The first is that the ones and zeros at the source (a Blu-ray player or HD cable/satellite box) are not exactly the ones and zeros your TV uses to create a picture -- at least, not in exactly the same order. Before sending the signal out via the HDMI output, the ones and zeros are rearranged to minimize how many transitions there are. So instead of 10101010, the transmission may look like 11110000. If you really like math, how it does this is cool, but it's not really important to understanding the concept as a whole.
Even though this conversion is weird, it makes it much more likely that the data transmitted can be rebuilt on the other end (as in, at the display).
The second part of TMDS (the DS part) is the HDMI cable itself. Each HDMI cable is actually multiple small, copper wires. Two versions of the data are sent over different wires. One of these is out of phase with the "real" signal. The TV receives all the data, puts the out-of-phase signal back in phase, then compares it to the "real" signal. Any noise picked up along the way will now be out of phase, and as such it is effectively negated and ignored.
If you're an audio person, this is similar to how balanced (XLR) cables work.
TMDS works really well, allowing for short cables and fairly long cables to carry what is a pretty intense amount of data. It also means you can have inexpensive cables that work just as well as expensive ones.
It's often said that with an HDMI signal, you either get everything and it's perfect, or it isn't perfect and you get nothing. In fact, I've said this. If you're getting an image that looks correct, and there are no dropouts in the audio or video, then you're getting everything that's being sent
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Originally posted by Venom View PostNot worth it.
Www.monoprice.com
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monoprice is one of the best secrets on the internet. God I love that place."When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." -Benjamin Franklin
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury." -Alexander Fraser Tytler
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