Better HDMI Cables..?

:small_blue_diamond:A simple question.

Is there anyone here,.who has experienced that the picture getting better on your TV with better HDMI-cables,.or the sound.?

/Peder🌼

Yes I’ve looked into this & with both theoretical & actual (begged/borrowed/loaned a bunch of different cables together with a local 10 person AV group) and concluded there is no advantage with “better” cables (I understand that to mean more expensive, including mad money examples) - HDMI 2 is all you need.
HDMI cable is either Standard or High Speed, Standard is out-of-date & supports only the old lower resolutions; High Speed supports everything & HDMI 2.0 gives you 4K TV at 60fps (Ultra HD).
We could not detect any change in picture quality with any HDMI 2 from <£5 to a >£100. And that included testing on some very expensive AV systems

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Does this mean we have new axiom Mike? …“pixels are pixels” :wink:

Seems like it, pixels is pixels.
My contribution to this test was more as an observer with some techie background. One of the group still doesn’t believe it, maybe it’s because his mega priced HDMI cables are mega priced so they must be better. The guy with the mega expensive AV system who we tested it on was more than convinced there is no difference with either video or audio.
However I do expect someone on the forum to come back & say they can clearly see the difference & my post is all dogs dangly bits - oh well such is forum life.

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My experience with hdmi cables is that you need a high quality one to produce a reliable picture from the best 4K source. Also, there is a definite difference in picture quality when you use a high quality hdmi. When I say ‘high quality’, I mean something like AudioQuest. £120 Monster, rubbish. £175 Wireworld, rubbish. Both relatively expensive, but absolutely rubbish. Choose wisely or listen to Mike.

The biggest difference with high quality hdmi is with the sound. They sound way better.

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Agreed on sound. Also when using HDMI ARC from Netflix etc. on TV into an Oppo 203 and then the 252.

Oh you definitely need better quality cables, if you send 4k UHD through a £2 standard HDMI the result is usually rubbish (i.e. it doesn’t work!); no you need an expensive £5 High Speed HDMI cable at more than twice the price!

Beyond that though, just as Mike says, pixels is pixels.

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Yes but what HDMI version ???
1.0, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 … … 2.0 or 2.1

Minimum 2.0 if 4k.

There’s no such thing as an HDMI 2.0 cable, HDMI cables come in Standard and High Speed.

HDMI 2.0 is an HDMI electrical and protocol interface standard, and transmitting higher speed data of that standard requires an HDMI High Speed cable.

There is a world of difference between HDMI cables and connector bandwidth… and it is all about bandwidth…

For best video quality you usually need to run a high chroma encoding levels (4:2:2) and high pixel colour resolution (>12bit) as well as reasonably high pixel resolution.

I use a HDMI 2.1 connector along with the newish Ultra High Speed HDMI cable category standard. This supports 48gbps transfer and is good for high definition colour 4K.
Belkin make such a cable, and is I believe the cable recommended by Apple for AppleTV.

I found regular HDMI 2 connectors with 18gbps cable caused sparkles, glitches and sync problems when running with high definition colour with 4K. Standard colour resolution 4K (8 bit with chroma 4:2:0) was fine however, but just doesn’t look as good on quality media.

Standard colour definition 4K HDMI2.0
High colour definition 4K HDMI2.1

Note not all equipment supports high colour definition 4K and associated bandwidths, however most modern equipment supports standard definition 4K

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