Thanks for your honest opinion
Surely it sounds outlandish *to you*, and I see no problem with that. To clarify it for yourself though, I would suggest you read HDMI spec and especially section on underlying transport protocols, cable categories, supported frequencies, signal attenuation, and also on what "error correction" really means there. Or read at least a consumer-level Wikipedia article.
There is nothing wrong with being ignorant on this topic, btw (I was). The article you mentioned was written by a guy who understands no more than a bad cable can cause "snow" or no signal. That is way too far - I have never seen this in my life (well, maybe just once with a $1.69 HDMI cable I once had - you see, I did!
).
In general though, it is not my goal to change your opinion on anything; you are certainly free to ignore it or call whatever you want and continue believing in $1 cable. You would not do any disservice to me in any form by believing in something different.
Once you are ready to challenge what you know though (or just curious), I'd suggest you invest $59 and get 1m of Pangea HD-24PCe cable from Audio Advisor, and connect a good quality Blue-ray player (or an HD satellite receiver from your provider such as directv) to your good quality plasma or other TV and see for yourself. Do your own A/B test.
If you won't see any difference, hey, good for you. I did, and I took advantage of it by replacing *all* HDMI cable (and I already had AudioQuest Cinnamon or higher everywhere) in my home theater/living room/bedroom/you name it.
And you are right, HDMI is a kind of off-topic here.
You may think I'm ignorant and you are entitled to your opinion but that doesn't necessarily make you right either. You may have a masters in EE but you do seem much less familiar with basic neuropsychology.
Re- The link, The guy that tested these cables is a TV Calibrator with no apparant hidden agendas and he did study image quality closely... good enough for me!
I am more than happy with the picture quality provided by a bluray on my HDTV, it is so good that I can't imagine it being improved by much if at all. Even if it was possible that it could be improved by a small percentage, I certainly don't think it would be noticable at my12-15ft viewing distance through a pair of 38 year old MK1 eyeballs.
I can understand not buying the cheapest of USB cables, but I’d do that for reliability, not audio quality. As Bones stated in the last page. On average, digital links deliver one bit error for every 1012 bits sent. You can’t possibly hear that!... a fact highlighted by blind ABX tests, an example of which I'll happily provide a link for, if you so wish?
Noise on the ground plane caused by wrongly chosen, poor spec switching diodes in budget equipment is quite obvious and apparant at low volume levels with certain systems and can probably be improved in some cases by better sheilding, ferrite beads or even providing a seperate ground plane altogether to avoid 'ground loop'.
'Jitter' caused by timing discrepancies in non asychronous DAC's is identifiable to the trained ear and cannot alter the overall sound signiture. This is another subject all together and although linked should not be a factor with a correctly designed cable that meets the design specifications just as much as it is not with a so called 'audiophile' cable.
You suggest I A/B test a particular HDMI cable? Don't you see an inherant flaw in that suggestion? Never underestimate the power of the subconscious. In my first year studying Aero Eng we looked at the 'Human factors' which can contribute to pilots making errors in judgement, refusing to believe what their instrumentation was telling them, be it from fatigue, information overload, arrogance, lack of visual cues or a combination of these factors. We then went on to study how the brain works, how it uses visual cues to predict a scenario based on previous experiences often filling in the blanks which can make us even see and hear things that simply do not exist.
Last summer I was cleaning the bottom of the pool with a brush for maybe 30 minutes or so. Once finished I climbed the ladder and looked across the meadow at Tina (my Girlfriends horse) I suddenly became aware of a fairly intense, deep strawberry red coloured tint to my vision, in shock I even looked up at the sun to see what was causing it
... nothing there!, It was merely that my brains colour balance had been skewed from staring at the bottom of the aqua blue pool for so long.
Try this experiment. If you have a graphic or parametric equaliser, reduce a band somewhere in the midrange area (say, between 500Hz and 1kHz). Listen for about 15 minutes, then restore the missing frequency range. Suddenly it will sound as if it has a hugh peak in the midrange, and for a time will sound awful. Within another 15 minutes or so, everything will have settled back to normal. Therefore, can you trust what you hear? Do you know why? Do you even care?
With regards to audio/visual cue impairment, here is a good example called 'the McGurk effect' (Google it if the UK link doesn't work for you) which perfectly demonstrates how what we see can make our brains interpret what we hear to sound completely different.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
It might seem far removed for you, but yes, what I am suggesting is that without blind ABX testing you are leaving yourself open to what you hear (or see, in the case of HDMI) being influenced by your preconceived, subconscious idea that this beautifuly built, well designed cable with it's lovely finish and colour WILL produce superior results.
There are two particular things to which one can easily fall prey - the 'experimenter expectancy (or bias) effect' and the 'placebo effect'. Both are potentially very powerful, and can shape the outcome of a test at the subconscious level. If you change a passive component in a system and expect to hear a difference, then you probably will. What actually caused the difference will be curdled by your brain (at a subconscious level), and you will be left thinking that the component change made the difference, when in fact it was 100% imagination. This is why all proper medical tests are double-blind, to guard against these well known phenomena. It is a BIG mistake to think that you are immune - no-one is immune because we don't even know it's happening.
"'Critical thinking, logic, reason, science — these are all terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept — that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality. Through teaching and encouraging critical thought our society will move away from irrationality, but we will never succeed in completely abandoning irrational tendencies, again because of the basic nature of the belief engine."
James Alcock- 'The Belief Engine' - http://www.csicop.org/si/show/belief_engine
As an open minded objectivist- If you can present me with a solid ABX test that supports/backs up your findings/perceptions I'll certainly be more than happy to re-evaluate my current views on the subject.
Ari
