we told you we would test the most popular HDMI cables and we're doing it
but it turned out to be a lot more work than we bargained
for the good news is it was all worth it
53 cables from 17 different
manufacturers totaling ,000 dollars
$1,000 and after painstakingly labeling
testing and logging all of them we've got the juicy details for you which ones
are topnotch which ones aren't even worthy of being used as a skipping rope
we're going to tell you and also give you some guidelines that you can follow
to make sure that you are not getting ripped off on
cables ask a cable vender and naturally they'll claim that their product does
everything from dissipating noise to reducing Emi interference to Turning
water into wine but you an intellectual
you're too smart for that you should just buy the cheapest cable every time
right well not quite the truth as usual
lies somewhere in between you see on the
surface an HDMI cable is basic you've got your plugs on the ends 19 conductors
in between and some kind of plastic sheath covering the whole thing they're
basically a commodity item but as we learned on this journey there is a lot
that can happen in between the two ends and some of the Bold performance claims
actually can change the user experience
also well over 10% of the cables that we bought and tested failed to meet their
claims let's start then with a handful of things that don't matter one while it
looks nice and feels premium this right
here is not a signal carrying component of the cable and as long as it isn't so
corroded that it literally cannot fit in the slot the inclusion of gold plating
on the HDMI connector housing doesn't matter two and this is going to blow
your mind but I give you my personal Linus Tech tips guarantee that anyone
selling you a cable based on the conductors inside is probably bsing you
to be clear better conductors or better construction can improve signal
Integrity which will increase the chance that a cable will meet spec and we will
talk about that more in a bit but that is the manufacturer's problem not yours
for digital signals like HDMI all that matters is that the signal arrives
reasonably on time and at a high enough amplitude that it can be read what that
means is that whatever materials are used if the cable meets the spec there
will be no loss of ones or zeros and therefore there cannot be any
discernable difference in quality if you say you believe otherwise you are a
sucker or you are a liar but here's the
thing that doesn't mean that all of the marketing is snake oil in order to meet
the spec or to improve the user experience there can be numerous
physical differences from one cable to the next many of which wouldn't be
obvious to the eye at least not without cutting them open category 1 and
Category 2 cables for example both have four Twisted pairs to carry color sink
and clock signals but the with Ethernet versions took some of the extra
conductors and added a fifth twisted pair to carry Ethernet the Category 3
spec by contrast includes this fifth Twisted Paris standard so then
are all HDMI cables with Ethernet the
same no not even close remember how I
said materials don't matter well they do
in theory because we're still using the same conductor count and connector from
nearly 20 years ago a cable that was made in 2001 could conceivably carry a
modern 8K 60 HZ signal just not very far
the thing is each new generation of the HDMI spec has approximately doubled the
maximum data rate putting much greater demands on cable quality that is why
certification is so important everything from the gauge of the wires to the
tightness and consistency of the Twisted pairs to the yes the materials including
both the conductors and the shielding will impact the Integrity of the signal
over a given distance so a manufacturer who cracks the code so to speak might be
able to stay in Spec over a longer distance or create a a lighter more
flexible cable using thinner conductors
but from a performance standpoint if you are comparing two compliant cables at
the same length you don't need to care what's inside them with that in mind we
set off and purchased a whack load of cables from The Usual Suspects Amazon
Best Buy mono price and a few others for good measure for the majority of these
we bought three or more of each cable why well because one failure could be a
Luke two is a coincidence but three
that's a pattern before we get to the results though one really important note
here is we were initially aiming to test only HDMI 2.1 cables cuz that's the
latest and greatest but because neither Amazon Basics nor Best Buy Insignia
brand offer HDMI 2.1 cables we decided to test those 2.0 rated cables as well I
mean they're both Category 3 right maybe it'll work wow Colin that's a lot of
tests yeah it was it was a
lot there uh something is there's more than 53 here yeah uh I also went around
the office and grabbed some interesting cables just to see what would happen they're down at the bottom as bonus got
it okay let's start with the normies though of the 53 cable tests nine failed
these failing cables were made by four different manufacturers belcon mono
price Amazon Basics and cable Decon doing the math here that is a 16.9 nice
perc failure rate that means that the odds of buying an out ofpc HDMI 2.1
cable even if you shop with reputable Brands is nearly one in five wow two of
them passed the signal Integrity test meaning you'd probably never know
something was wrong where they failed was on continuity that means that some
of the wires were outright not connected where they were supposed to be pretty
lame the other seven failed on either signal Integrity alone or or a
combination of the two at HDMI 2.1 speeds none of our cables failed on the
third category DC resistance which means that any of them would comfortably power
a low power device like say an early generation chomecast this kind of makes
sense because DC resistance increases with length and most HDMI 2.1 cables are
quite short we found that this is a much bigger concern with passive cables at
lengths of 25 ft or more let's start with the most surprising of our failures
Amazon Basics was doing really well until they had one that failed number 28
here now because this is the only one that didn't make it out of our batch of
three it looks more like a one-off and
considering that it's also one of the 10-ft cables it's not that surprising
what is surprising though is that these three numbers 25 26 and 27 all of which
are 6-t cables not only passed the HDMI
2.0 spec but they also passed the HDMI 2.1 spec at 48 G gbit per second that's
pretty good that makes Amazon basic six-footers one of the best bang for the
buck cables on the market but not quite the best that Throne is reserved for
infinite cables who not only guarantee their cables for HDMI 2.1 instead of
just maybe it'll happen but they even charge about 17% less per foot our next
runner up in the fail Olympics then is mono price which hands down had the
worst showing out of all the manufacturers we tested only 11 of their
15 cables passed our tests and we're also starting to see a trend with the
only failures coming from either 10 or 15t lengths due to Signal Integrity that
makes sense if you remember from our previous video the longer a cable gets
the more voltage drop is experienced across its length and the more
opportunity there is for interference something else interesting is that the
fails all occurred on the same pair of signal wires number four and number six
now consistency in manufacturing is usually a good thing but consist
failing well that's a bad thing looking
at these fail reports we also find something very interesting you know how
the best lies have a grain of Truth at their core well much of the marketing
particularly around audio file HDMI cables centers around Jitter and Jitter
is bad really bad High Jitter means that
even though your signals are being sent at regular intervals they might not be
arriving at those same intervals it's terrible for any application but in
really different ways Professor Riley in
analog signaling even a small amount of Jitter can manifest as an obvious loss
in audio quality with pops crackles and
other unpleasant anomalies maybe snaps
this appears to be the grain of Truth upon which modern audio file marketing
is built but where it turns to horse plop is when these same principles are
applied to digital signaling digital
signals are made up of discrete
zeros and ones Jitter can't change the order of
the data but it can change when it arrives which can lead to it being read
incorrectly let me show you this is an
eye diagram from our tester and at its Center is a single data sampling point
right where the ey is a one or a zero is
measured at this point as Jitter increases the the variance between our
samples also increases thickening these lines causing the eye to narrow like
this lots of Jitter takes what used to be a good signal like this and makes the
signal not come in on time meaning the sampling Point could be at a point where
the signal is still rising or falling to a one or a zero respectively once you
can't get a clean reading your data is
garbage and you will experience a very obvious failure either sparkly or more
likely a complete loss of signal so there you have it either
everything arrives in order and on time or nothing does that's why I Mark all
late assignments with a zero back to you lonus oh nice hoodie by the way LTT
store.com you better believe it Wan hoodie V2 is awesome and it's finally in
stock get yours today let's move on to the most expensive cable we tested this
braided HDMI 2.1 cable from belon it
cost me a tiar inducing $841 cents per foot and it failed
miserably on its continuity checks we did only get one of them and the signal
Integrity technically passed but at this price frankly one failure is enough for
me don't take a risk on this we also tested an Rog cable that we had lying
around the office and to our surprise even though it was in included with a
monitor it also failed though it was just on continuity so it probably will
work for most applications it just goes to show that we should be checking the
cables that come with products going forward to see what kinds of Trends we
discover our last cable that failed was this short little cute one from cable
Decon we're assuming that the LED
feature that's in the cable here caused it to fail on the continuity test but it
also failed on Signal Integrity so best just to skip over this particular cable
so that's some pretty surprising results now if we step back for a sec and take a
more macro view we start to see some Trends first is cost paying more than
say about a dollar a foot for an HDMI cable appears to be a complete and utter
waste of money at least from a signaling perspective with that said there are
other attributes that might be important for your application properly rated
sheathing for example is probably required for an in-wall installation in
your area UV resistant cables can be useful for outdoor installations flat or
flexible cables might look nicer in your theater room and active cables are great
for hitting longer distances or in the case of optical active cables running in
environments with a lot of interference we can also say that if you're going
anywhere over 10 ft with HDMI 2.1 you're
asking for trouble only 50% of our 15t
cables passed and it seems like the high bandwidth signal just doesn't have the
beans to transmit over lengths like that without the voltage dropping to
unreadable levels so for those situations you're going to want to
consider going active or even Optical active I think this testing is pretty
definitive at this point and answers the most important questions about the HDMI
cables that y'all are actually shopping for and turbo nerds can check out the
full data dump on our Forum at the link down below but if you guys disagree and
you think that we should blow hundreds or even thousands of dollars testing
extra snake oily audio file gear tell us in the comments who we should be secret
shopping and maybe we'll take another stab at in a future video there's still
tons of stuff we want to get into with our cable tester here and we sure hope
you guys have enjoyed this deeper dive into HDMI cable quality which leaves
only one question what am I going to do with all
these HDMI cables actually I know I'm going to
replace all the bad ones that have been causing intermittent problems for us
here at the office for the last seven
years I'm actually super stoked
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if you guys enjoyed this video go check out our original cable tester video
because it's got a lot more detail about how you guys can interpret some of the
visuals that you just saw