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I read the article (link below) which basically says save your money and buy a budget cable rather than a 'boutique' brand, but I'm not convinced with their testing methodology as although their tests are extensive, they seem to only test the technical measurents after dismissing subjective assessment by eye because 'other factors such as source, screen etc' could affect the results.This is total BS as if the same source and screen are used there is no variable, and the whole point of buying expensive cables is to get either a better sound or picture that we can subjectively hear or see.
While not being convinced by the conclusions of PCWorld then, I would still be interested to hear the experiences of anyone who has compared brands of HDMI in their own systems.
Best Regards,
Chris redmond.
Follow Ups:
I see a difference in picture quality, and I've used out of the box cables (packaged with my Sam Sung DVD player)and compared it to the Monster, Kimber, and Furutech offerings.
There are slight but evident differences in black levels and color saturation. With a quick AB test, the differences can be small, but over the length of a movie, it matters to me as it affects things like eye fatigue and such. I find myself less likely to keep wiping my glasses when the picture is better......
I do use a Marantz Plasma, three years old with 768 resoluton, BTW. Line conditioning also makes a noticeable difference. While the eye and brain can be remarkably adaptive, long term A-B comparisons do show differences that often can be missed in a very short term comparison. Going back to an inferior cable always makes me want to readjust the settings.
Stu
"Going back to an inferior cable always makes me want to readjust the settings."I have a similar experience with analogue interconnects, in that once I've become accustomed to a better cable which perhaps might not initially have shown a cheaper cable a clean pair of heels, returning to the cheaper cable is quite shocking.
Best Regards,
Chris redmond.
The biggest problem with HDMI is the damn connectors/interface. They really suck. Some cables use cheap connectors that don't make good contact. Some people have complained about intermitant connections due to the cable wiggling and loosing contact. I upgraded my HDMI, and noticed a *minor* improvement.
Jack
Up to a certain length, they're pretty much equal.After a certain length, the quality, material and workmanship is a factor. There's plenty of discussion about this on AVS Forum and some tests that are being done at Secrets (see link below). My suggestion would be to test 1920x1080p video and 8 channels of uncompressed PCM audio at the same time -- their tests aren't as demanding (ie; 1080i and Dolby Digital). After a certain length, comments like "bits are bits", "cables are cables", etc are easily proven wrong.
AVS Forum members seem to think these (scroll to the bottom of the linked page) are all that you need. I haven't seen any complaints, so that says something positive about their capabilities.
We do the engineering for a lot of military systems installations, and, assuming its meets the baseline spec, cable is cable regardless whether its for an off-the-shelf PC monitor or a megabuck highly sensitive function. Same applies to connectors. The $10M unit gets the same quality DB25 as the $200 monitor. And these are in systems where many high density high speed data inputs are processed and if all could be made .1% "better" with a paltry few grand in special cables it would be a big deal. If DoD system providers can't justify "high end" cable to enhance performance in fantastically expensive critical systems, I doubt there's any real enhancement to be had for mundane video and audio.
I settled on Blue Jeans Cable HDMI after trying some expensive
stuff with my Sony SXRD. Not pricey and the quality and more
importantly to me (with cats running) is the connection is
very good. Only one pull out to date in 7 months due to the
varmits, and that was my fault for razzing them!Andrew
It's a great picture, and I doubt an expensive cable would make much difference, if any.
When I used component cables, upgrading the freebees made a big enough improvement that even my wife comented.
Jack
We had a big jump in quality and enjoyment going from Component
to HDMI cable. Much less eye fatigue as mentioned. That is a very
good point. I thank these Forums for much of what I learned in
the new experience.Andrew
Of course there are differences & they are clearly visible. That said, I have had people tell that DVDs look better than a film based movie. Clearly they have a problem with their vision!Subjective assessment by eye is what has pushed the development of various film formats. But once again you have the techie types saying that all that matters is measurement, as if our senses are inferior to measurement devices.
and sound has greater resolution. you may not be able to perceive differences in visual reproduction between 2 hdmi cables, but you can definitely detect sonic differences arising from different makes and cable directionality. play a cd through the hdmi cables. pick the one that sound better. chances are visually it would be better too, but it will be difficult to verify since most people won't have 2 screens side by side and we still don't have a playback source with 2 hdmi outputs. incidently, it also implies that we have less visual memory retention ability than audio.
I fear audiophiles often imagine their audio memory to be greater than it is, so they claim to hear differences they could not discriminate in a forced choice test, e.g., ABX where you need to be able to reliably say whether X is A or B. So audiophiles dismiss such tests out of hand.db
We don't want to get into the whole DBT debate (I hope???), but quite often it's the case that we can't pick out differences in short term tests, when over the long term it's obvious that 'A' is fatiguing while 'B' is more involving.
Best Regards,
Chris redmond.
The one thing that the boosters of double blind tests overlook, is that they are asking the wrong question. The boosters ask, can you tell the cables apart? The question should be, WHICH do you LIKE better.Double blind drug trials are not run asking patients to identify which SSRI they are on, nor are they asked if the pick the placebo from the real anti-depressant. They are asked, Do you feel better?
Estes,If you can't tell one from another, how are you supposed to tell which you like better? It is circular.
A double blind trial that asks a patient if he feels better can be a valid forced choice procedure. If patients are just as likely to say they feel better after receiving a placebo, you can conclude the treatment is not efficacious; OTOH, if patients reliably feel better after taking the treatment, you can conclude it is efficacious. Of course, in a double blind test neither the giver nor receiver know in advance whether the treatment or placebo was given.
Regrading an earlier poster who posits fatigue as a dependant variable, that is a complex, ill defined variable too subject to confounding to be reliable.
db
The point I am making is you don't ask the PATIENTS which medication they are on. That is why it is not circular. The main researcher knows of course, as he/she is the one keeping track.Clearly, you record who gets what, in a fashion so that no one knows what they are on, just as you describe. You ask the patients "how do you feel", NOT can you tell which medication are you on.
The number of "feel better", side effects and so forth are tabulated, run through a statisical analysis to determine if the medication is, in fact, effective. There are patients who say the medication has no effect, just as there are others who say the placebo works great. The question then becomes are these rates difference from chance, as determined by statistical analysis.
Back to my point, in a blind test of equipment, you should be asking the participants, which sound do you like better, not can you tell wire A from wire B.
Estes,I'm not sure why you can't understand that your reasoning is circular, but I don't think it's worth beating on any more. Early in my career I designed and anlayzed many experiments. That was one of my strong suits, because I was more interested in that than human auditory perception, even though my post doctoral work centered on binaural processing. I'm afraid I was more interested in the methodology than the substance. When I got a DEC PDP-11 with 8 kBytes of memory! to control my lab, all else flew out the window. At the Acoustical Society meetings the old guys used to complain that all the kids talked about was their computers.
You're not related to the famous Bill Estes fron Stanford are you?
db
Maybe I am mistaken. But I can't help but feel you are missing my point. In a drug trial for example, it does not matter what the participants guess they are on (guess, because in a DBT, they don't know what they are on), but the statistical rates of improvement. So the question asked is, do you feel better? (in a general sense). By extension, we should ask, which picture LOOKS better. But as you said, enough.We could into a discussion on the value of computers...the cognitive science guys are really into computers & seem to ignore that there is a biological substrate (ie. a brain & nervous system). So I am with the old guys ;-)
To answer your question, no not Bill from Stanford. However, I should say nearly all of my research has been clinically focussed. In fact, during the dissertation defense the first comment from my external was, "clearly you are a clinican". That has been my focus since that time, as I find the whole publication process, needlessly nasty.
My buddy, who is a fellow of the APA, still gets nasty replies to his papers from "blind reviewers". He has been at it long enough (& has enough status) to be able to say that the reviewer or editor are "inexperienced". His response to reviewers who say sections are not well written, is also worth a laugh. He says, "I can see how this reviewer may have misunderstood what I was writing about."
I will take this opportunity to thank him again for helping through the thesis process. Don, has the ability to summerize the ramblings of a "student" & put it into context, very helpful as you wade through tons of papers. His help with the stats was also greatly apperciated.
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