there's an oft-repeated piece of advice among av enthusiasts if an HDMI cable is
built to spec and it functions properly there's no reason to spend extra money
on something fancy because a digital transmission isn't nearly as susceptible
to interference as an school analog connection in other words
it basically works or it doesn't indeed we did a video on our channel a while
back that showed how silly certain over-engineered HDMI cables can be
but that doesn't mean it's always a great idea to buy the cheapest most bare
bones cable either so to find out what actually matters when buying an HDMI
cable we spoke to you green a manufacturer of HDMI cables and we'd
like to thank them as well as phillips aoc and david chef for his translation
services so it turns out that using the correct material inside of an HDMI cable
can make a big difference but that doesn't mean that you should go out and find cables with platinum unoptimium
alloy or whatever other nonsense cheaply made HDMI cables sometimes use steel
which isn't a particularly good conductor meaning it's something that
you should generally avoid you might see cables that are made of copper coated
steel but these aren't really any better instead go for cables with pure copper
wiring inside the good news however is that copper cables aren't super
expensive and you don't need to get anything higher grade such as silver
plated copper what then becomes important is how thick the wiring is
inside which is measured by something called a gauge number and
counterintuitively a lower number means a thicker wire as a general rule of
thumb your cable length shouldn't exceed 1.5 meters with a thin 32 gauge wire but
as you go thicker and thicker you can safely have a longer and longer cable
run without having to worry about signal attenuation or interference because your
cables are too thin as indicated by this helpful chart however you won't find
much thicker than 24 gauge since at that point the cables simply become too thick
and difficult to bend another thing to consider is the connectors on the end of
the cable gold plating is better if you can find it but take note that i'm not
talking about the large part on the outside that manufacturers often color
gold to give the cable a more premium look i'm talking about the actual
contacts on the inside of the connector gold plating won't really affect your
performance but it will give you better longevity as the gold is an effective
barrier against wear and corrosion especially if you're unplugging and
replugging the cable quite often which i don't do because my tv is too close to
the wall once you've found a cable made with good materials try and find out if
it's been tested to work with a wide variety of equipment some cheaper cables
are only tested with a couple of monitors so they might not play very
nicely with your gadgets if you're running them in any kind of setup that
isn't super straightforward such as with an HDMI splitter if the manufacturer
doesn't list testing methods on their website read reviews and and find out if
any other customers have had problems with compatibility and on the subject of
compatibility make sure you're buying a premium high speed cable if you want 4k
at 60hz or HDR these have a speed of around 18 gigabits per second as opposed
to the 10 gigabits of the more standard high speed cable not premium high speed
and you'll need the extra bandwidth to enable higher frame rates and deeper
colors interestingly manufacturers actually made these faster cables not
with exotic materials or radical design changes but simply by improving the
manufacturing process to minimize small defects in the copper that can hurt the
signal increase latency and introduce interference however faster speeds still
mean a smaller margin for error so if you're trying to use ultra high speed 48
gigabit cables to get the most out of HDMI 2.1 for example you probably don't
want to get a cable longer than three meters just remember generally speaking
shorter and thicker is better just ask kim k
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