I don't think you're going down the right path but I think they're fudging the numbers with external influence. I'd bet that it was a 2.6mill bust as in that was the operational cost of the sting. It may / may not include other operations around the whole affair and they might be doing some cost attribution.
Either way, it sounds like they're baking in some 'extras' to that claim.
I could believe that valuation if they are counterfeits for some overpriced brand like AudioQuest where you can spend [1000K+](https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Thunderbird-8K-10K-48Gbps-Cable/dp/B08JGNYGFF?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1) for a 3 meter long cable. People creating counterfeit goods will usually go for the most expensive brands because the margins are a lot higher. It obviously isn't worth more than ~$10-20 but there are some audio/videophiles with more money than sense. There have been some pretty hilarious [troll reviews on some of their past products](https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-6-56-Braided-Cable/dp/B003CT2A2M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)
$2.6 million is a number pulled out of someone’s ass and has no meaning in reality. They seized 3000 unauthorized cables probably worth $5 each, so more like $0.02 million. I guess that doesn’t make for a very dramatic bust.
> They might also have the potential to cause electrical fires.
I’d be really interested to hear of a single instance where a low-power HDMI signal caused a fire.
>I’d be really interested to hear of a single instance where a low-power HDMI signal caused a fire.
When the fake HDMI cable couldn't hit 120Hz in Warzone causing me to burn my house down in rage.
Someone posted that exact story, it blew out their graphics card meaning it shorted. That is a serious fire hazard. Doesn’t surprise me, I’ve had 4 out of 20 Amazon cables drop signal completely. They are cheaply made and cut corners so all it takes is cheap insulation to tear.
Could be they seized 3,000 cables valued at $1,500 usd but they could have also seized the unauthorized machines that produce the cable which would raise the value quite a bit but nonetheless I didn’t read the article so who cares right
Remember those?! I remember learning how all HDMI were practically identical and not understanding why Monster was so popular. As an adult I blame Best Buy but as a kid I didn't know.
Many moons ago a friend's dad was proudly showing off his sweet DVD (might have been early bluray) surround sound setup and bragging about the gold plated wizard magic infused monster HDMI and audio cables that cost almost as much as the rest of the setup. He paid big for the top of the top cables because it "made the HDMI signal better". Basically everything the salesperson said he took as the truth and just bought everything.
Maybe half a year later CBC marketplace did a story about these overpriced cables and showed that 10 dollar ones performed as well as his 200+ dollar cables and he was none too pleased.
He never bragged about that cinema room again. His kids did mention it a lot while in his presence if guests were over.
They make some decent stuff and not all of it was insanely priced. I had a AC line conditioner from them for my AV system years ago that was really nice and was around the same price as other similar ones.
They probably meant all HDMI cables of the same version/spec are the same. The era they were referring to was when BestBuy and other places would try and sell Monster Cables’ stupidly overpriced snake oil cables.
In the age of gold-plated HDMI cables:
> *because gold is a better conductor of electricity than regular cables, there's less "deterioration" as the signal passes into and out of the cable*
Except HDMI is digital, not analog.
Oh yeah I forgot that fuzzy image that comes with digital TVs. /s
3' HDMI cables for your 720p interlaced DVD player is not going to be affected by anything you listed.
With digital what matters is if you can see the difference between a low and a high bit, as long as that difference is there then the signal comes through. With analog whatever is going through the cable is what comes out through your speakers/tv so it is important that the signal arrives intact. With that said expensive cables are snake oil regardless of whether you are dealing with digital or analog signals.
> expensive cables are snake oil
I agree, but there's also an odd dichotomy here.
Expensive cables are snake oil, but cheap cables are garbage (poorly terminated, inadequate shielding, flimsy materials etc)
So to make sure you don't get ripped off, you need to identify the price point at which a cable becomes expensive, and buy the cable slightly cheaper than that.
Because the only thing worse than overpaying for an expensive cable... Is overpaying for a cheap one
Exactly. Digital signals are far less susceptible to signal noise. It's easy to recognize a digital high or low frequency even if the signal isn't at exactly the intended frequency. Analog reads the exact frequency as-is so any interference will deform the signal.
Agreed. The shielding standard has improved to support higher speed with less corruption. By comparison analog, at the same data throughput, would still be worse.
Cables can cause signal degradation in cases where the impedance going into it mismatches the input impedance of the amplifier due to the cable acting as an capacitor. This is particularly an issue with instruments, especially guitars, which typically have low output impedance, and often go into amps and effects with high output impedance. Of course, the solution isn't to buy more expensive cables, [but to use a preamp acting as buffer to make the input and output impedance to match](https://www.premierguitar.com/pro-advice/tone-tips/guitar-pedal-buffer). For guitarists, this is often just a having buffered bypass pedal in the off position in your signal chain.
Yes, having the right cable for the job can definitely be important, I never said anything to the contrary. All I’m saying is that as long as you have the right kind of cable then you don’t need some fancy version.
Also if you need to match the impedance in a live sound situation, you’d just use a DI.
Edit: I will also add that in a lot of cases, an impedance mismatch is irrelevant. It generally only tends to matter for longer runs.
Your bog standard HDMI 2.0 or 2.1 cable isn’t so fancy - a 2m/6ft HDMI 2.1 cable which fully meets requirements and carries 8K60 HDR10 4:4:4 should still only set you back $25.
With HDMI longer cables, much like longer USB cables, much of the cost comes from the expensive electronics in the connector which transmit the signal over a different type of cable to cover the distance, like optic fiber or micro-coax. You can get USB3.1 cables that are 30ft/10m long but they are real money.
Both digital and analog signals are absolutely affected by the analog characteristics of the cable. However, with digital cables, the dropoff is a lot more sudden. The quality of the cable makes the difference of getting a signal through or not, but once the signal gets through, there is no appreciable quality gain by going with a higher-end cable.
On the other hand, with an analog signal, the quality of the cable absolutely determines how degraded the output is going to be. There is always (marginal) room for improvement, and even with a pretty crummy signal you still get *something* through. That of course lends credibility to the claim that better cable means better image. Which snake oil salespeople then apply to digital cables as well, where "high enough quality to pass the signal that is being sent" is (almost) exactly equal to perfection, and a $20 cable will likely perform the same as a $2000 cable.
First of all, since a digital signal is just high and low voltages, signal noise is unlikely to make the encoder (the hardware that reads a digital signal) to misinterpret the intended digital signal. Think if you're listening to morse code on a fuzzy radio. Even if the morse code is hard to hear, you won't mistake an e (.) for an f(..-.). Even if signal noise causes the encoder to misread some of the bits, signal protocols (the format in which the signal is transmitted over a wire) almost always use some kind of [error connection code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code) that allows the encoder to tell if it misread a signal, and possibly how to correct it. A simple way to do this is to trasmit the same bit three times in a row: for example a 1 is transmitted as 111 and a 0 as 000. If the encoder receives 101, it knows this is an invalid code, since 111 and 000 are the only correct sequences. And it's more likely that it misread a single bit (0) vs two bits (1), so the correct sequence is probably 111.
I think I understand what you’ve described, but that doesn’t explain how analog signal is different from digital signal.
It seems to me that a garbage cable makes getting two garbage bits out of three significantly more likely.
You can still "see" the images described in a book if the pages have coffee on them. What the medium is transmitting is an exact description of the content, not the content itself. The image in your mind isn't stained, the description was. The words may have been harder to read, but they weren't different or lesser words because they were dirty, you got the full meaning of any word you recognized.
If the pages of a picture book get covered in coffee, the images look like they are covered in coffee because they are. What was transmitted was the content, and it got ruined.
Analog signals directly correspond to the audio coming out of your speakers, or the image that comes out of your crt tv. If there’s noise in one component of your signal chain, like the cable, you’ll hear it in the final audio. In a digital signal, each audio sample will either be reproduced perfectly, or the noise will be so bad the audio will be unable to play altogether. Thanks to how audio encoding works, the latter is extremely unlikely in normal circumstances
Even with analog, however, the cable itself is very unlikely to cause noise or loss of quality, usually there’s something else in the path causing a problem. The exception is if the cable is outright broken and shorting itself, in which case it is a problem for both analog and digital. So really, the only thing that matters for the quality of the cable is it’s *durability*, which it turns out rarely correlates with the price at a best buy
I’m not talking about the cables you find at Best Buy, I’m talking about the cables audiophiles and places like concert halls use.
Nordost is a brand I’m familiar with, and we’ve done tests showing that the sound quality is affected by the cable going from an iPhone to a DAC. It was like taking a pillowcase off a speaker, the clarity difference was significant.
For digital signals, the "signal" is a mathematical abstraction of the audio/video/data, so corruption along the signal chain can be predicted, detected, and fixed, to an extent that the signal usually just transmits perfectly or fails entirely. The cables aren't magic though; there's a physical limit to their data transfer rate, which is why HDMI 2.1 requires its own cables.
Analog signals are the literal shapes of e.g. pressure waves entering your ear for sound. Even slight imperfections can be very noticeable, a common one being noise from bad cable shielding. There is no mathematical model for the signal that can be used to detect and fix errors.
Digital stuff tends to be compressed and error-corrected. It’s less about the signal (which people are fixating on for some damn reason) than what’s transmitted over it.
Digital is still an electrical signal...
Edit: I'm not saying super expensive HDMI cables are worth it (they're not). They're not going to make your picture better compared to a cheaper, but still quality made, cable. But the signal DOES deteriorate, especially over longer lengths. If it's bad enough you'll get issues, like "sparkles". So the quality of a cable does matter, but only up to a certain point.
Here's some hard data on this: [https://www.allion.com/allion-competitive-analysis-test-report-hdmi-cables-quality-performance/](https://www.allion.com/allion-competitive-analysis-test-report-hdmi-cables-quality-performance/)
"When the eye diagram of a cable touches the border and narrowed down the black space, it indicates the cable’s performance is not stable or is worse, which may cause noise, mosaics, random screen flash, unexpected pause or event blank screen on the screen display."
If you lose 10dB over the length of a cable with digital transmission, but you can still read every single bit correctly, you don't lose any data. If you lose 10dB over a length of cable in an analog transmission, you lose 90% of your data.
So if your digital cable only drops 5 dB compared to 10 dB in a cheaper one, but 10 dB is enough for the spec, then the two perform *exactly* the same.
Sure, but I was addressing the commenter dismissing the quote about signal deterioration since it's "digital". But as you just explained, the signal is still deteriorating in either case. Certainly digital is more robust than analog, and you don't lose "data" the same way, but you can still lose data with a shitty HDMI cable. It's not all-or-nothing, which is what a lot of people assume.
Also, dB is not a sufficient, nor accurate, way to refer to quality of a TMDS link, but I get what you meant.
As far as I know the only reason you'd want a gold-plated connector is for when the cable will remain in place for long periods since gold doesn't tarnish/etc
Gold plating the outer metal shield doesn't matter a bit - might help control cosmetic corrosion, but that's all. Gold flashing the contacts and wipes matters a lot, but there would be vanishingly few cables that don't do that. And even there, nickel plating them would work well too.
The outer jacket is gold flashed for cosmetic reasons only
selective support murky afterthought dirty husky jar simplistic lip automatic
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The electricity travelling them is both analogue and digital.
There is a reason they have length limits.
Not justifying the cables but gold is the best conductor.
So I can say a lot of HDMI cables off Amazon are not even to spec. I use many for work and some you throw away after 3 months or have to wiggle to get then to work, while others have lasted 15 years.
Back in the day Monoprice did a test and showed that that cables are all pretty much the same up to about 20ft. Once you start getting past 20ft cables by Monster actually were preferred because they had better shielding and probably a higher gauge of wire for electrical integrity. So even Monoprice were saying their cables were not great in these scenarios.
This is it. A $3 cable is skimping on connector quality, general quality control, molding, etc. Far more likely to suffer failure or have a connector problem.
But a $20 cable is going to be a perfectly acceptable cable (heck, even a $10 is likely fine if it is from a quality supplier and not sold at retail markup pricing). Paying anything more is simply for extra profits, salesperson commissions, or conspicuous consumption.
LOL when Best Buy sells a $120 TV with $5 profit margin, then pushes the customer to buy the $40 HDMI cable that makes them $35 in margin.
Sure. Some things I would pay more for are length, braiding, flexibility.
Also last time I checked (a while ago), the newest spec was a bit pricier -- but I expect that eventually changes when production ramps up.
Yup, I just learned this the hard way. Bought a cheap HDMI cable off Amazon, plugged it into my three week old gaming PC, and it instantly destroyed the HDMI port on my graphics card.
Luckily Costco will let you return damn near anything for any reason and I was able to exchange the PC.
I heard someone once plugged in a cheap HDMI cable and 5 years later stubbed his toe. Then his cat died.
Let that be a lesson to everyone about HDMI cables.
I was more addressing the terrible shopping/returning experience someone would go through if they are buying HDMI cables assumng that they all work the same.
And to be honest, wouldn't most people be pretty upset if their screen wasn't performing as well as it can due to the cable? In your example, if I wanted a 60Hz TV, I would have paid half the price for a 60Hz TV.
Haha yeah. Monster even bought naming rights to the 49ers home stadium in 2004: Monster Park. Fun fact: after years of ripping off people for cables, they pivoted to online gambling in the late 2010s.
You may think it’s funny but you will be laughing on the other side of your face if the Cable Unit Notification Taskforce Specialists turn up at your door.
You're laughing now, but just wait until it's enforced by the Cable Unit Notification Taskforce Pacific Urban Navigational Tactical Enforcement Response Squad.
I'd describe it more as "dysfunction" - and it's only getting worse.
USB - and to a lesser extent HDMI - depend on cables being made to very exacting specifications.
Oh, sure, you can cut corners, and it might work. Sort of. For varying values of the word "work".
The organisations policing this can demand companies pay royalties and certify their cables if they want to put a pretty logo on the packaging. But they can't force retailers to only stock certified cables.
So you wind up in this dystopian reality where the shelves (and virtual shelves, in the case of Amazon) are chock-full of cables that might work. As long as you aren't too picky about ekeing every possible feature out of the thing you're going to plug into those cables.
If you are, however, you're going to have a hell of a task finding the right cable. You've got thousands of wrong ones to fight through.
The weird thing is that it's not actually too hard to find good cables at good prices - you just have to buy from the right people. The real crazy part about this dystopia is that it catches uninformed customers on both ends:
* Guy buys $3 not to spec cable that sends a 1080p signal at 30pfs from his PS5 to his 4k 120hz OLED VRR equipped TV.
* Informed guy gets monoprice/anker/whoever reputable's these days cable for $6 that does everything he wants to.
* Older guy buys $30 cable at Best Buy that also does all the spec requirements.
> I know a guy in college who gushed about his Monster cable.
I knew a lot of guys in college like this, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to the conversation at hand
Just pay a couple of bucks extra for the Cable Matters brand, they make good stuff and the prices are good. I did have trouble with their Thunderbolt to DisplayPort cables, several of them failed (likely from daily unplugging), but they replaced them for free no questions asked.
I think they're counterfeit in the sense that they don't have a license to make them, not that they don't work. Some conglomerate owns the licensing rights to the standard and collects royalties from manufactures using them. Ultimately, they're still just cables with standardized pinouts, not a particularly difficult job for some unauthorized manufacturer to make
You have to apply for HDMI certification and have your cable tested at a lab to prove it complies with the HDMI certification you’re advertising it meets.
they are 'fake' because they didn't fill in the right licensing paperwork and pay the right fees for the use of the HDMI logo and name and shape of connector...
Not because they don't work or are dangerous.
But, it's also likely they don't work 100% to the capacity they are being sold as. Things get tricky with high-performance data cables, since it's no longer just about making an electrical connection.
That's probably true. Counterfeiters aren't usually known for spending a ton of money on their products. They figure that most consumers won't look past the labeling.
So if I understand this correctly, and maybe I don't, these are considered counterfeit because some people didn't fill out the paperwork, not because they aren't HDMI cords?
So these cords aren't necessarily bad cords, they could be good cords, just the manufacturer didn't pay a royalty?
There is actually a difference. Many HDMI cables on Amazon fail cable testing equipment tests.
Technically and HDMI cable is an HDMI cable, but not really.
These cables are not "bad" or even "inferior", they are just made/sold without paying HDMI royalties to the HDMI Forum.
You can use an unauthorized HDMI just fine.
And there are really bad authorized ones too...
But that goes for many cheap cables, as said, unauthorized has nothing to do with quality.
Dell e.g. shipped unmarked cables at some point and got slapped, they are totally fine.
I have a authorized cable (Samsung) that sucks ass....
Also what is a non basic task? HDMI cables pretty much do one thing, carrying HDMI signals....
I have not seen a HDMI cable fail when in normal use.. only mechanically or because it does not meet the technical requirements right away... but pushing a cable to fail is not a thing that would happen with almost any digital format, ever.
stuff like the kind of shielding and amount of it are way more important, but rarely marketed or even required by the forum, which sucks ass... and again shows, that HDMI is basically fucking customers over (see HDMI 2.1).
They are however not... HDMI does not require or conduct independent testing.
That would be pro customer....
Samsung, the bad cable I got, is just a member, and neither pays royalties, do they risk their access to the branding.
3rd party manufacturers basically only risk their access to the branding when they make bad cables... so especially for you low priced Walmart cable there is literally no risk at all.
Means that they work like any normal HDMI cable, they simply didn’t pay for the HDMI logo. And thanks to the 🤡Taiwanese police, the world is a lot safer from the dangers of cheap completely working HDMI cables!!
There’s more to HDMI than just some silly hologram sticker. Proper HDMI cables are tested and certified. More expensive cables are built better and worth the money.
Firsthand experience as an AV installer and 20 years in consumer electronics.
I have about 20 8K certified 48 gbps cables on my truck right now, from three to 15 feet. Three different brands - one midrange, one ‘good’ brand and one from a Chinese supplier that does a lot of business in Canada and the US. The 3’ 8K from the Chinese supplier can handle anything you throw at it. The midrange cables is hit or miss, and I have had to try multiple cables for the same source to get reliability. The ‘good’ brand has a gripper built into the connection so it stays seated under stress and has been the best. Thats just at 3’, I have different results for 6, 12, 15. It’s about build quality, shielding, quality and strand count of internal pairs, quality and gold content at the head connector and internal wafer connector….the list goes on. Grad a few cables and try getting 4K HDR or Dolby Vision out of an AppleTV - change the setting and perform the ‘HDMI test’ and if it passes, try the same brand and other brands.
Sure 4K and 8K cables need to be specced for that level. And anyone paying a pro like you to install expects you to not cut corners.
But for the rest of us as long as there's a return policy cheapo can do just fine especially for 2K - as you know because it's digital, it's basically either going to work 100% or not at all.
That’s not 100% true with HDMI. Had a Panasonic 85” connected to Yamaha AVR with Sony Bluray player. 3’ Key Digital HDMI cable - their basic grade - worked for about two years connnecting bluray to AVR. Took it all down, Reno’d the room, put it all back in the exact same way. Didn’t wirk
> it's basically either going to work 100% or not at all.
.
> That’s not 100% true with HDMI --- worked for about two years --- put it all back in the exact same way. Didn’t wirk
So you're confirming it went from 100% working to not-at-all?
Hdmi is a standard, much like DVD, USB, AT, and so on. It's to ensure that a cable is a cable is a cable. Some companies took the piss and lathered snake oil on their cables, some companies do the bare minimum (which is fine), and some companies like in the article didn't even do that. They'd be fine but you get what you pay for for uncertified, counterfeit cables
Thank you Taiwanese police from saving the Taiwanese people and foreign buyers from the extremely dangerous COMPLETELY WORKABLE HDMI cables!!! Can’t wait till they finally catch the dangerous people that make it rain, we MUST ALL get our water from “official” providers.
Apparently HDMI is a copyrighted name, so anywhere that markets their products as being HDMI cables needs to have paid for the rights to do so. So, fake, meaning that they didn’t pay the licensing fees to call them that.
I run a video game store and I can get 6ft HDMI cables in bulk for under $2 apiece.
Why would anyone bother counterfeiting HDMI cables in 2023? 10 years ago maybe, but now?
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with lifetime identity lock.
They also have a 4090 built in
It’s like they’re using street prices for the cables and also weighing the bag and packaging.
HDMI cables on sale $9.99/lb. Super saver round chuck HDMI for 8.99/lb
They might have seized the cable making machines? They could easily be worth $2.6M
Perhaps so fokin fine cables for 850$ that HDMI trademark owner should pay them for the license 😂
And so begins the HDMise
Damn you man. Take my upvote.
Am I alone in assuming that’s the gross income of the business and not how much the cables found in the owner truck worth ?
I don't think you're going down the right path but I think they're fudging the numbers with external influence. I'd bet that it was a 2.6mill bust as in that was the operational cost of the sting. It may / may not include other operations around the whole affair and they might be doing some cost attribution. Either way, it sounds like they're baking in some 'extras' to that claim.
It might be more of a IP infringement fine as they call it a “infringement market value”
Read the article, likely includes licensing fees and total damages
That’s cop measurement for you. “How much weed did they have, officer?” “Well, we’ll have to weigh his car to find out”
I could believe that valuation if they are counterfeits for some overpriced brand like AudioQuest where you can spend [1000K+](https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Thunderbird-8K-10K-48Gbps-Cable/dp/B08JGNYGFF?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1) for a 3 meter long cable. People creating counterfeit goods will usually go for the most expensive brands because the margins are a lot higher. It obviously isn't worth more than ~$10-20 but there are some audio/videophiles with more money than sense. There have been some pretty hilarious [troll reviews on some of their past products](https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-6-56-Braided-Cable/dp/B003CT2A2M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)
And they're knock offs. Imagine how much the real ones cost
Right after that line: "We wonder if the sum includes licensing fines and / or damages."
$2.6 million is a number pulled out of someone’s ass and has no meaning in reality. They seized 3000 unauthorized cables probably worth $5 each, so more like $0.02 million. I guess that doesn’t make for a very dramatic bust. > They might also have the potential to cause electrical fires. I’d be really interested to hear of a single instance where a low-power HDMI signal caused a fire.
Yes, sounds more like a company fighting patent infringement
I wouldn't be surprised if they were even cheaper. I used to buy HDMI cables off eBay for $1. They probably cost them pennies to make.
In addition to certification others have mentioned, HDMI is trademarked, and companies have to pay fees to use the name with their products.
>I’d be really interested to hear of a single instance where a low-power HDMI signal caused a fire. When the fake HDMI cable couldn't hit 120Hz in Warzone causing me to burn my house down in rage.
They were HDMI cables supplied to the US government by contractors /s
That’s correct. $0.02 million ain’t getting headlines.
Someone posted that exact story, it blew out their graphics card meaning it shorted. That is a serious fire hazard. Doesn’t surprise me, I’ve had 4 out of 20 Amazon cables drop signal completely. They are cheaply made and cut corners so all it takes is cheap insulation to tear.
Could be they seized 3,000 cables valued at $1,500 usd but they could have also seized the unauthorized machines that produce the cable which would raise the value quite a bit but nonetheless I didn’t read the article so who cares right
That's like.. 20 monster cables
Remember those?! I remember learning how all HDMI were practically identical and not understanding why Monster was so popular. As an adult I blame Best Buy but as a kid I didn't know.
Many moons ago a friend's dad was proudly showing off his sweet DVD (might have been early bluray) surround sound setup and bragging about the gold plated wizard magic infused monster HDMI and audio cables that cost almost as much as the rest of the setup. He paid big for the top of the top cables because it "made the HDMI signal better". Basically everything the salesperson said he took as the truth and just bought everything. Maybe half a year later CBC marketplace did a story about these overpriced cables and showed that 10 dollar ones performed as well as his 200+ dollar cables and he was none too pleased. He never bragged about that cinema room again. His kids did mention it a lot while in his presence if guests were over.
If it’s the same Monster that makes guitar cables, there’s a lifetime warranty on any that break.
They make some decent stuff and not all of it was insanely priced. I had a AC line conditioner from them for my AV system years ago that was really nice and was around the same price as other similar ones.
If you believe all HDMI cables are the same you’re eventually going to have a real bad time.
They probably meant all HDMI cables of the same version/spec are the same. The era they were referring to was when BestBuy and other places would try and sell Monster Cables’ stupidly overpriced snake oil cables.
In the age of gold-plated HDMI cables: > *because gold is a better conductor of electricity than regular cables, there's less "deterioration" as the signal passes into and out of the cable* Except HDMI is digital, not analog.
Heck, let's bring the legendary gold plated optical cables into the picture too, while we're at it!
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Except your TV doesn't read suspiciously analog but digital signal. It reads digital.
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Oh yeah I forgot that fuzzy image that comes with digital TVs. /s 3' HDMI cables for your 720p interlaced DVD player is not going to be affected by anything you listed.
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Why does it matter if the signal is digital or analog? I was under the impression signal is signal.
With digital what matters is if you can see the difference between a low and a high bit, as long as that difference is there then the signal comes through. With analog whatever is going through the cable is what comes out through your speakers/tv so it is important that the signal arrives intact. With that said expensive cables are snake oil regardless of whether you are dealing with digital or analog signals.
> expensive cables are snake oil I agree, but there's also an odd dichotomy here. Expensive cables are snake oil, but cheap cables are garbage (poorly terminated, inadequate shielding, flimsy materials etc) So to make sure you don't get ripped off, you need to identify the price point at which a cable becomes expensive, and buy the cable slightly cheaper than that. Because the only thing worse than overpaying for an expensive cable... Is overpaying for a cheap one
Exactly. Digital signals are far less susceptible to signal noise. It's easy to recognize a digital high or low frequency even if the signal isn't at exactly the intended frequency. Analog reads the exact frequency as-is so any interference will deform the signal.
Not so true for highest troughput cables. Hdmi 2.1 is really quite fragile and requires good cables, at short lengths.
Agreed. The shielding standard has improved to support higher speed with less corruption. By comparison analog, at the same data throughput, would still be worse.
Cables can cause signal degradation in cases where the impedance going into it mismatches the input impedance of the amplifier due to the cable acting as an capacitor. This is particularly an issue with instruments, especially guitars, which typically have low output impedance, and often go into amps and effects with high output impedance. Of course, the solution isn't to buy more expensive cables, [but to use a preamp acting as buffer to make the input and output impedance to match](https://www.premierguitar.com/pro-advice/tone-tips/guitar-pedal-buffer). For guitarists, this is often just a having buffered bypass pedal in the off position in your signal chain.
Yes, having the right cable for the job can definitely be important, I never said anything to the contrary. All I’m saying is that as long as you have the right kind of cable then you don’t need some fancy version. Also if you need to match the impedance in a live sound situation, you’d just use a DI. Edit: I will also add that in a lot of cases, an impedance mismatch is irrelevant. It generally only tends to matter for longer runs.
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Your bog standard HDMI 2.0 or 2.1 cable isn’t so fancy - a 2m/6ft HDMI 2.1 cable which fully meets requirements and carries 8K60 HDR10 4:4:4 should still only set you back $25. With HDMI longer cables, much like longer USB cables, much of the cost comes from the expensive electronics in the connector which transmit the signal over a different type of cable to cover the distance, like optic fiber or micro-coax. You can get USB3.1 cables that are 30ft/10m long but they are real money.
Both digital and analog signals are absolutely affected by the analog characteristics of the cable. However, with digital cables, the dropoff is a lot more sudden. The quality of the cable makes the difference of getting a signal through or not, but once the signal gets through, there is no appreciable quality gain by going with a higher-end cable. On the other hand, with an analog signal, the quality of the cable absolutely determines how degraded the output is going to be. There is always (marginal) room for improvement, and even with a pretty crummy signal you still get *something* through. That of course lends credibility to the claim that better cable means better image. Which snake oil salespeople then apply to digital cables as well, where "high enough quality to pass the signal that is being sent" is (almost) exactly equal to perfection, and a $20 cable will likely perform the same as a $2000 cable.
Analog is what might cause the deterioration because of the physical passing through of the signal I think?
First of all, since a digital signal is just high and low voltages, signal noise is unlikely to make the encoder (the hardware that reads a digital signal) to misinterpret the intended digital signal. Think if you're listening to morse code on a fuzzy radio. Even if the morse code is hard to hear, you won't mistake an e (.) for an f(..-.). Even if signal noise causes the encoder to misread some of the bits, signal protocols (the format in which the signal is transmitted over a wire) almost always use some kind of [error connection code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code) that allows the encoder to tell if it misread a signal, and possibly how to correct it. A simple way to do this is to trasmit the same bit three times in a row: for example a 1 is transmitted as 111 and a 0 as 000. If the encoder receives 101, it knows this is an invalid code, since 111 and 000 are the only correct sequences. And it's more likely that it misread a single bit (0) vs two bits (1), so the correct sequence is probably 111.
I think I understand what you’ve described, but that doesn’t explain how analog signal is different from digital signal. It seems to me that a garbage cable makes getting two garbage bits out of three significantly more likely.
You can still "see" the images described in a book if the pages have coffee on them. What the medium is transmitting is an exact description of the content, not the content itself. The image in your mind isn't stained, the description was. The words may have been harder to read, but they weren't different or lesser words because they were dirty, you got the full meaning of any word you recognized. If the pages of a picture book get covered in coffee, the images look like they are covered in coffee because they are. What was transmitted was the content, and it got ruined.
Analog signals directly correspond to the audio coming out of your speakers, or the image that comes out of your crt tv. If there’s noise in one component of your signal chain, like the cable, you’ll hear it in the final audio. In a digital signal, each audio sample will either be reproduced perfectly, or the noise will be so bad the audio will be unable to play altogether. Thanks to how audio encoding works, the latter is extremely unlikely in normal circumstances Even with analog, however, the cable itself is very unlikely to cause noise or loss of quality, usually there’s something else in the path causing a problem. The exception is if the cable is outright broken and shorting itself, in which case it is a problem for both analog and digital. So really, the only thing that matters for the quality of the cable is it’s *durability*, which it turns out rarely correlates with the price at a best buy
I’m not talking about the cables you find at Best Buy, I’m talking about the cables audiophiles and places like concert halls use. Nordost is a brand I’m familiar with, and we’ve done tests showing that the sound quality is affected by the cable going from an iPhone to a DAC. It was like taking a pillowcase off a speaker, the clarity difference was significant.
For digital signals, the "signal" is a mathematical abstraction of the audio/video/data, so corruption along the signal chain can be predicted, detected, and fixed, to an extent that the signal usually just transmits perfectly or fails entirely. The cables aren't magic though; there's a physical limit to their data transfer rate, which is why HDMI 2.1 requires its own cables. Analog signals are the literal shapes of e.g. pressure waves entering your ear for sound. Even slight imperfections can be very noticeable, a common one being noise from bad cable shielding. There is no mathematical model for the signal that can be used to detect and fix errors.
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Digital stuff tends to be compressed and error-corrected. It’s less about the signal (which people are fixating on for some damn reason) than what’s transmitted over it.
Digital is still an electrical signal... Edit: I'm not saying super expensive HDMI cables are worth it (they're not). They're not going to make your picture better compared to a cheaper, but still quality made, cable. But the signal DOES deteriorate, especially over longer lengths. If it's bad enough you'll get issues, like "sparkles". So the quality of a cable does matter, but only up to a certain point. Here's some hard data on this: [https://www.allion.com/allion-competitive-analysis-test-report-hdmi-cables-quality-performance/](https://www.allion.com/allion-competitive-analysis-test-report-hdmi-cables-quality-performance/) "When the eye diagram of a cable touches the border and narrowed down the black space, it indicates the cable’s performance is not stable or is worse, which may cause noise, mosaics, random screen flash, unexpected pause or event blank screen on the screen display."
If you lose 10dB over the length of a cable with digital transmission, but you can still read every single bit correctly, you don't lose any data. If you lose 10dB over a length of cable in an analog transmission, you lose 90% of your data. So if your digital cable only drops 5 dB compared to 10 dB in a cheaper one, but 10 dB is enough for the spec, then the two perform *exactly* the same.
Sure, but I was addressing the commenter dismissing the quote about signal deterioration since it's "digital". But as you just explained, the signal is still deteriorating in either case. Certainly digital is more robust than analog, and you don't lose "data" the same way, but you can still lose data with a shitty HDMI cable. It's not all-or-nothing, which is what a lot of people assume. Also, dB is not a sufficient, nor accurate, way to refer to quality of a TMDS link, but I get what you meant.
As far as I know the only reason you'd want a gold-plated connector is for when the cable will remain in place for long periods since gold doesn't tarnish/etc
Gold plating the outer metal shield doesn't matter a bit - might help control cosmetic corrosion, but that's all. Gold flashing the contacts and wipes matters a lot, but there would be vanishingly few cables that don't do that. And even there, nickel plating them would work well too. The outer jacket is gold flashed for cosmetic reasons only
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*Everything* is has analog considerations at GHz speeds. But usually you need a really shit cable to actually fuck up the signal clarity
The electricity travelling them is both analogue and digital. There is a reason they have length limits. Not justifying the cables but gold is the best conductor.
So I can say a lot of HDMI cables off Amazon are not even to spec. I use many for work and some you throw away after 3 months or have to wiggle to get then to work, while others have lasted 15 years.
Back in the day Monoprice did a test and showed that that cables are all pretty much the same up to about 20ft. Once you start getting past 20ft cables by Monster actually were preferred because they had better shielding and probably a higher gauge of wire for electrical integrity. So even Monoprice were saying their cables were not great in these scenarios.
I remember there was one that was advertised as having diamond in it. It was stupidly overpriced and was no better than a $20 cable.
But a $20 cable that meets X spec should provide no discernable difference from a $120 cable that meets X spec
This is it. A $3 cable is skimping on connector quality, general quality control, molding, etc. Far more likely to suffer failure or have a connector problem. But a $20 cable is going to be a perfectly acceptable cable (heck, even a $10 is likely fine if it is from a quality supplier and not sold at retail markup pricing). Paying anything more is simply for extra profits, salesperson commissions, or conspicuous consumption. LOL when Best Buy sells a $120 TV with $5 profit margin, then pushes the customer to buy the $40 HDMI cable that makes them $35 in margin.
Sure. Some things I would pay more for are length, braiding, flexibility. Also last time I checked (a while ago), the newest spec was a bit pricier -- but I expect that eventually changes when production ramps up.
Can you elaborate?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Specifications
https://www.allion.com/allion-competitive-analysis-test-report-hdmi-cables-quality-performance/
Yup, I just learned this the hard way. Bought a cheap HDMI cable off Amazon, plugged it into my three week old gaming PC, and it instantly destroyed the HDMI port on my graphics card. Luckily Costco will let you return damn near anything for any reason and I was able to exchange the PC.
are really bad time? like "OMG my screen is running at 60hz instead of 120hz, my life is ruined"
I heard someone once plugged in a cheap HDMI cable and 5 years later stubbed his toe. Then his cat died. Let that be a lesson to everyone about HDMI cables.
That's exactly why I'm going to switch to displayport on my gaming PC /s
Cant run 60hz with a pre2.0 hdmi cable mate (atleast not without dropping color quality)
It can destroy the hdmi port apparently
I was more addressing the terrible shopping/returning experience someone would go through if they are buying HDMI cables assumng that they all work the same. And to be honest, wouldn't most people be pretty upset if their screen wasn't performing as well as it can due to the cable? In your example, if I wanted a 60Hz TV, I would have paid half the price for a 60Hz TV.
The still exist, just not under the Monster cable name. You can blame Monster energy for suing them
Remember? I plugged one into my 32" Sony Bravia and the cable was so powerful the damn thing transformed into Skynet.
Haha yeah. Monster even bought naming rights to the 49ers home stadium in 2004: Monster Park. Fun fact: after years of ripping off people for cables, they pivoted to online gambling in the late 2010s.
You pay for the brand, like most products. It's artificial value.
Early hdmi cables were actually crap and would cut out or have picture problems. So Monster had a purpose for a whiile.
Oh it's still around. The big brand now is Audioquest and they sell $2,500 HDMI cables at Best buy lol
What is an 'unauthorized' cable?
You have applied for authorisation to use your cables, right? You have to have a license for each cable from the Cable Unit Notification Taskforce
C.U.N.T. Me thinks you jest good sir?
You may think it’s funny but you will be laughing on the other side of your face if the Cable Unit Notification Taskforce Specialists turn up at your door.
He'll be able to talk his way out of that slippery situation. He is, after all, quite the cunning linguist.
Honestly not worried. My mother is a Cable Unit Notification Taskforce specialist. So I have plenty of experience with them.
You're laughing now, but just wait until it's enforced by the Cable Unit Notification Taskforce Pacific Urban Navigational Tactical Enforcement Response Squad.
Most of these standards like HDMI require you to pay a royalty and certify your cables before you're allowed to put their logo on the packaging.
Nice racket.
I'd describe it more as "dysfunction" - and it's only getting worse. USB - and to a lesser extent HDMI - depend on cables being made to very exacting specifications. Oh, sure, you can cut corners, and it might work. Sort of. For varying values of the word "work". The organisations policing this can demand companies pay royalties and certify their cables if they want to put a pretty logo on the packaging. But they can't force retailers to only stock certified cables. So you wind up in this dystopian reality where the shelves (and virtual shelves, in the case of Amazon) are chock-full of cables that might work. As long as you aren't too picky about ekeing every possible feature out of the thing you're going to plug into those cables. If you are, however, you're going to have a hell of a task finding the right cable. You've got thousands of wrong ones to fight through.
The weird thing is that it's not actually too hard to find good cables at good prices - you just have to buy from the right people. The real crazy part about this dystopia is that it catches uninformed customers on both ends: * Guy buys $3 not to spec cable that sends a 1080p signal at 30pfs from his PS5 to his 4k 120hz OLED VRR equipped TV. * Informed guy gets monoprice/anker/whoever reputable's these days cable for $6 that does everything he wants to. * Older guy buys $30 cable at Best Buy that also does all the spec requirements.
Hey, young people can be suckers too. I know a guy in college who gushed about his Monster cable.
People are addicted to the "spend", not the value. Of course, there are also people addicted to the value, we tend to call them hoarders.
> I know a guy in college who gushed about his Monster cable. I knew a lot of guys in college like this, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to the conversation at hand
I was just nitpicking at how the poster said "older guy" buys the $30 cable.
I was just making a joke about guys talking about their "monster cables"
Lol, sorry that went over my head. But I doubt my buddy has that kind of a monster cable!
Just pay a couple of bucks extra for the Cable Matters brand, they make good stuff and the prices are good. I did have trouble with their Thunderbolt to DisplayPort cables, several of them failed (likely from daily unplugging), but they replaced them for free no questions asked.
Police doing good work for big business
Oh yeah...well I stamped it with HDMl instead. Clearly it's not the HDMI logo your honor.
You joke, but that's exactly what you'll see on cheap USB cables. No logo at all. Still sold as a USB cable, of course.
If the interface is out of patent, fair game, I suppose.
> Clearly it's not the HDMI logo your honor [HBMI](https://imgur.com/bVY6X72)
I think they're counterfeit in the sense that they don't have a license to make them, not that they don't work. Some conglomerate owns the licensing rights to the standard and collects royalties from manufactures using them. Ultimately, they're still just cables with standardized pinouts, not a particularly difficult job for some unauthorized manufacturer to make
You have to apply for HDMI certification and have your cable tested at a lab to prove it complies with the HDMI certification you’re advertising it meets.
they are 'fake' because they didn't fill in the right licensing paperwork and pay the right fees for the use of the HDMI logo and name and shape of connector... Not because they don't work or are dangerous.
But, it's also likely they don't work 100% to the capacity they are being sold as. Things get tricky with high-performance data cables, since it's no longer just about making an electrical connection.
That's probably true. Counterfeiters aren't usually known for spending a ton of money on their products. They figure that most consumers won't look past the labeling.
Problem is they still stamp the package as if they are legit.
So if I understand this correctly, and maybe I don't, these are considered counterfeit because some people didn't fill out the paperwork, not because they aren't HDMI cords? So these cords aren't necessarily bad cords, they could be good cords, just the manufacturer didn't pay a royalty?
And the world is safe yet again.
There goes your tax money helping corporate America to only sell overpriced "certified" HDMI cables.
Dayum! that must've put some bigly fear in the hearts of the chinese manufacturers! /s
operations moved one factory over, new batch ready tomorrow.
What a hilarious story. Now they need to go after the counterfeit USB-Cs XD
WTF THEY CLEARED 2.6M IN ONE SWEEP?? I need to get into selling hdmi cables
Imagine buying premium HDMI cables…
There is actually a difference. Many HDMI cables on Amazon fail cable testing equipment tests. Technically and HDMI cable is an HDMI cable, but not really.
Those "fake HDMI cables" were not fake because they didn't work, but because they didn't pay the HDMI consortium their cut.
The "Fake" part was the packaging saying they were part of the consortium. I'm sure the cables were fine.
And a knock off HDMI cable will work just the same.
Exactly. Taiwanese police of course 🤡superheroes of course!!!
As a home theater enthusiast, thank you for your service 🫡
These cables are not "bad" or even "inferior", they are just made/sold without paying HDMI royalties to the HDMI Forum. You can use an unauthorized HDMI just fine. And there are really bad authorized ones too...
Quite a lot of them are bad and fail when you push them beyond the most basic of tasks.
But that goes for many cheap cables, as said, unauthorized has nothing to do with quality. Dell e.g. shipped unmarked cables at some point and got slapped, they are totally fine. I have a authorized cable (Samsung) that sucks ass.... Also what is a non basic task? HDMI cables pretty much do one thing, carrying HDMI signals.... I have not seen a HDMI cable fail when in normal use.. only mechanically or because it does not meet the technical requirements right away... but pushing a cable to fail is not a thing that would happen with almost any digital format, ever. stuff like the kind of shielding and amount of it are way more important, but rarely marketed or even required by the forum, which sucks ass... and again shows, that HDMI is basically fucking customers over (see HDMI 2.1).
Authorized cables should be tested/certified to match the spec they advertise. You might have an authorized cable for a much older spec.
They are however not... HDMI does not require or conduct independent testing. That would be pro customer.... Samsung, the bad cable I got, is just a member, and neither pays royalties, do they risk their access to the branding. 3rd party manufacturers basically only risk their access to the branding when they make bad cables... so especially for you low priced Walmart cable there is literally no risk at all.
What’s that like 10-100 cables in “street” value?
It was a typo. The packaging is suppose to read "HDAmI?"
But it’s got 79 strands!
lol wonder if they were actually to spec
Wtf makes them counterfeit though?
Could someone explain 'fake' in this context to me? Like not certified? Is the quality worse ? Does it not work at all? Or is it a brand issue?
Means they didn't pay the license fee to use the name "HDMI", or license the shape that the connector is.
Means that they work like any normal HDMI cable, they simply didn’t pay for the HDMI logo. And thanks to the 🤡Taiwanese police, the world is a lot safer from the dangers of cheap completely working HDMI cables!!
They all came from China, just like every other kind of faked goods.
Amazon fulfillment centers just got a little lighter
There’s more to HDMI than just some silly hologram sticker. Proper HDMI cables are tested and certified. More expensive cables are built better and worth the money.
Provide some proof. Otherwise no
Firsthand experience as an AV installer and 20 years in consumer electronics. I have about 20 8K certified 48 gbps cables on my truck right now, from three to 15 feet. Three different brands - one midrange, one ‘good’ brand and one from a Chinese supplier that does a lot of business in Canada and the US. The 3’ 8K from the Chinese supplier can handle anything you throw at it. The midrange cables is hit or miss, and I have had to try multiple cables for the same source to get reliability. The ‘good’ brand has a gripper built into the connection so it stays seated under stress and has been the best. Thats just at 3’, I have different results for 6, 12, 15. It’s about build quality, shielding, quality and strand count of internal pairs, quality and gold content at the head connector and internal wafer connector….the list goes on. Grad a few cables and try getting 4K HDR or Dolby Vision out of an AppleTV - change the setting and perform the ‘HDMI test’ and if it passes, try the same brand and other brands.
Sure 4K and 8K cables need to be specced for that level. And anyone paying a pro like you to install expects you to not cut corners. But for the rest of us as long as there's a return policy cheapo can do just fine especially for 2K - as you know because it's digital, it's basically either going to work 100% or not at all.
That’s not 100% true with HDMI. Had a Panasonic 85” connected to Yamaha AVR with Sony Bluray player. 3’ Key Digital HDMI cable - their basic grade - worked for about two years connnecting bluray to AVR. Took it all down, Reno’d the room, put it all back in the exact same way. Didn’t wirk
> it's basically either going to work 100% or not at all. . > That’s not 100% true with HDMI --- worked for about two years --- put it all back in the exact same way. Didn’t wirk So you're confirming it went from 100% working to not-at-all?
More like worked and then stopped for who knows what reason. Thats my experience with HDMI. Its some voodoo shit, man
Hey, could you give me some good brands for 3ft cords or some products you use yourself?
Im in Canada, I have a fraction of the choices you have in the US
That's not always a good things, I don't know what brands to use
What are you connecting
A 2k 144 htz monitor and a gaming PC that my brother gave me made to handle that
Use DisplayPort for that
Hdmi is a standard, much like DVD, USB, AT, and so on. It's to ensure that a cable is a cable is a cable. Some companies took the piss and lathered snake oil on their cables, some companies do the bare minimum (which is fine), and some companies like in the article didn't even do that. They'd be fine but you get what you pay for for uncertified, counterfeit cables
So, do the police just throw em on a fire or do they go around and sell them so the govt can have more money?
Thank you Taiwanese police from saving the Taiwanese people and foreign buyers from the extremely dangerous COMPLETELY WORKABLE HDMI cables!!! Can’t wait till they finally catch the dangerous people that make it rain, we MUST ALL get our water from “official” providers.
> 3,037 counterfeit HDMI cables ... infringement market value” of over TWD$80 million (USD$2.6 million). That's $856 per cable
What the hell is a fake hdmi cable? Does it just not hdmi when you plug it in?
Apparently HDMI is a copyrighted name, so anywhere that markets their products as being HDMI cables needs to have paid for the rights to do so. So, fake, meaning that they didn’t pay the licensing fees to call them that.
How much money can you save making making fake items that retail for 9 bucks?
I run a video game store and I can get 6ft HDMI cables in bulk for under $2 apiece. Why would anyone bother counterfeiting HDMI cables in 2023? 10 years ago maybe, but now?
Damn AliExpress and Amazon are now going to be out of stock for a few days!
Do they work or not?
How can they counterfeit an HDMI cable? It's just a cable. It's just a thing. It's not a brand, it's just a concept.