HDMI cables

[jack]

Wow, I'd always heard people complaining about the ridiculous mark-up of HDMI cables, but I always assumed it was you know, a one hundred percent markup, or a two hundred percent markup, not a five thousand percent markup.

Comments

[catyak]

I got some 1m cables in Poundland, for a pound each, surprisingly...

Dave

[andrewducker]

Yeah, if you're spending more than whatever Amazon Basics charge for HDMI cables then you're being horribly ripped off.

[ptc24]

Are expensive HDMI cables the new audiophile nonsense?

[jack]

They seem exactly the same sort of nonsense to me, but I sort of resent cables being complicated (even when they actually are), so I've not learned anything about it.

It sounds like my standard approach of "buy a generic one" is correct here, but I don't actually know.

[andrewducker]

Oh Good Lord No. They've been audiophile nonsense for over ten years now :->

[gerald_duck]

Markup compared with what? Cost of manufacture?

Rule of thumb in the UK is that any hi-fi component must cost 1000% more in the shop than the cost of manufacture. That's not greed — that covers R&D, shipping, warehousing, distribution, import duties, VAT, overheads, lossage, warranties… and on a good day a smidgen of profit for all concerned.

In the computer industry the margins are a lot lower. But you don't get to try your PC out in a demo room beforehand, and they don't come and install it in your home for you at no extra charge. And, for the most part, computers don't look pretty enough to go in a middle-class suburban lounge.

But the distinction is being blurred. This is causing a serious problem to the hi-fi industry.

Meanwhile, the last HDMI lead I bought was £3.50 from RS components. That feels to me like the right price point for a lead that works reliably without any special properties.


With digital audio, the analogue properties of the digital signal (jitter, voltage bias and stability, etc.) emphatically do make a difference to sound quality, because the DAC cannot completely insulate the output from such effects. So the quality of a digital audio interconnect, though less important than an analogue one, still matters considerably.

But digital audio is still pretty closely related to the analogue signal it represents. For better or worse, HDMI is a way more abstracted. For me, whether a better HDMI cable can improve image or sound quality remains an open question that I might investigate as and when I'm trying to connect a good source to a good display. (-8

[jack]

Thank you for a detailed answer :)

I don't know exactly compared to what: I just looked on amazon for a reasonably priced cable (£1) and assumed that represented what it cost to manufacture and sell, and what some other cables cost (£50) and divided one by the other.

It's an interesting point that hi-fis may be expected to come with a lot of custom set-up, polish, etc. I remember someone (possibly you?) linking to a study comparing a cheap low-end system to high-end system, except that the low-end system was considerably more expensive than I'd ever bothered to spend on multimedia, so it's quite possible that a low-end "serious" system is significantly better than what I'd buy, if it's guaranteed not to have loose connections, etc, even if the expensive cables are not much better themselves, but just a nice perk for buying from an expensive shop.

But I've basically no experience with that industry whatsoever. I just want to plug Consumer Device A into Consumer Device B, and it comes as a shock that if you buy an ethernet cable, or a usb cable, or a scart cable, or whatever the cables analogue TVs used to use were called, you can just buy a standard one and it's "good enough", but if you buy an HDMI cable there's a whole ecosystem of competing cables. I know it might be important, but it's not how I expect cables to work :)