4 Tips for Choosing the Right HDMI Cable

I have been having problems with equipment rather than cables. My JVC LCD tv had the digital (HDMI) board replaced twice only to break a third time. My DirecTV receiver (HR20) HDMI output died, and my Toshiba DVD player is not generating any HDMI output. All these equipment are between 3 and 5 years old, so I am not sure if there are inherent issues with HDMI design or the older designs had issues that have since been corrected.

I am trying to place all my equipment in a closet and run HDMI cables to the TV’s in the house, so I am a bit worried about that.

Best

Mark

In response to Mark (01/22), although rare, I have seen examples of HDMI boards in devices being effectively destroyed by cables, especially if inserting or removing the cable while the devices are turned on, or if the connectors are poor fitting in the receptacle.  In a darkened room you can sometimes even see the arc of electricity that results between connector and receptacle, and this spark can take out the HDMI board.  More recent models are more robust, but ironically are even more reliant on the right choice of cables due to the higher bandwidth requirements of 1080p, Deep Color, and now moving towards 3D.  For whole home distribution, this means long lengths, so the choice does get even tougher - do your homework.  My philosophy is that the cables should be the bit you don’t have to worry about in an installation, and the way to achieve this is simply to buy ‘good’ ones.

There is a device made that can truely cut down on this problem. you need to look into a surge/spike supressor solely designed for the hdmi cables. It will protect from any voltage spike or even static electricity. Goggle part hdm-sp this may help you out

I have tested and used the “cheap” hdmi cables with no problems at all. The fact that Best Buy rips people off with hdmi cables up to $1000.00 is bull. The more expensive the cable does not always mean better. In fact, Monoprice.com offers cheap, excellent quality cables at an affordable price, without lying to the customer, like Monster or Best Buy.

@ Steven

We need to raise the bar for defining cables as “excellent quality”. This term doesn’t apply to cables that merely work. Get your favorite rep to bring his best cable demo to your showroom or go over to a reputable, high performance cable manufacturer, like Nordost, at your next trade show and get the skinny on why one cable performs better than another. Get them to show you. You will be amazed. And you can make more money while telling your customers the whole truth without short changing them on quality. The people who pay us to do their A/V work want to be amazed. If they didn’t want to be amazed, they’d shop at BBY or WLMT.