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this is a high quality cable right you know if i was doing a simple unboxing

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i'd be fooled too it's got a nice flexible sheath sturdy strain relief

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boots fair right rings for signal filtering i mean it says high speed

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right on it they wouldn't lie would they they won it's a piece of crap it's dead

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it's gone and how do we know thanks to total face who sent over their

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advanced cable tester v2 this thing is

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sick now it's industrial equipment so

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it's not the kind of thing we typically cover but it costs a fraction as much as

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competing solutions and we learned so much from using it that it absolutely

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deserves some time in the spotlight just like our sponsor glasswire keep track of

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at the link down below

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so what you might say you can test a cable big want to fight about it yeah i

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do want to fight about it it's a very big one we first explored the idea of

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doing LTT Store cables a couple of years ago but we ran into a major roadblock

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while it's easy to find an overseas supplier who can produce every kind of

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cable under the sun it can be very difficult not to mention costly to

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validate their work you need an expensive oscilloscope custom fixtures

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and perhaps most importantly a skilled

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operator or you can treat yourself to

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one of these but what exactly do you get for your

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money well a 3 amp 12 volt power supply

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all the associated cablery that's needed to operate the machine a tiny little

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sheet outlining all of the reasons that total phase can invalidate your warranty

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and the tester of course there's not really much to show on the outside you

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got your power switch you got a lan and micro usb port on the back there's

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no interface whatsoever so there's a little led here this is a non-touch

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screen you don't actually interact with the unit at all other than this slot

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right here so on the inside you've got these two

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female slots and then the test boards for whatever type of interface you want

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so this is an HDMI one just pop in like this and then they've got these little

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like what are they quarter of a turn third of a turn lugs so it looks like a

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big normal captive thumb screw but actually it's just super super fast to

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install let's poke around inside shall we now that we've got this baby opened

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up you can see the chassis is bigger than necessary but not by much

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all the main board traces and components are nicely laid out and labeled so we've

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got 12 volt dc power coming in right about there and it gets stepped

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down into 3.3 and 5 volt on these lines

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where they go uh there's 3.3 and there's five right about there and they've

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worked some clever modularity into the design our test interface sockets each

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with similar circuitry come out right over

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yeah and then they feed out into what appears to be the processor stack on a

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separate mezzanine board we did by the way note a couple of manually soldered

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wires here but kyle from engineering says they're i2c lines and won't affect

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anything so presumably it's the kind of thing that wasn't worth spinning up

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another revision of the board for what i suspect does the actual processing is

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this one right here and this one right here because those are the ones they've scratched out so yeah this is doing some

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processing but this is probably more of a general purpose processor hosting the

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web server and maybe taking whatever the outputs of these are this is actually

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quite normal it's not like they scratched those out because they were sending them to the media it's really

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common in the same kinds of places where cables get made cable factories for

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people to try to reverse engineer the tools that they need to make and

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validate cables so obviously anything they can do to protect their ip from

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their customers even is probably a worthwhile step

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in theory this thing is so simple to use

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that literally anyone could validate pretty much any cable that they would

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find on a shelf usb Thunderbolt lightning very very frightening display

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port and even HDMI all the way up to version 2.1 which is a blazing 48

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gigabit per second across four twisted pairs

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let's give it a whirl on some of our many cables we're at the size now where

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LMG owns a disturbing number of cables like literally

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hundreds of them in every freaking

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style and every freaking size

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now we could test power cables but in our experience those have been mostly

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problem free video cables on the other hand especially long ones or specimens

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with odd terminations can and have given

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us issues over the years like these monoprice DisplayPort cables

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i don't know that this is going to fail but i have a strong suspicion that it

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will i remember our first standing desk configs in the editing dent we used

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these for the monitors and i remember them having a ton of problems with them

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i'm starting with this displayport cable because i am

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i am sure that there is something less suck about it these horrible cables

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these cost so many headaches or maybe maybe it was something else

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now we're going to know for sure just starts going love it

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i knew it signal integrity it sucks let's have a look at the full report

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though so we want to go into details here and things get real freaking

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interesting on top of just pass fail which is all most people would need to

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know here we can dig into this interactive diagram pin by pin we can

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make our way down through all the different ways that it could fail so you

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can see our dc resistance is actually within spec and

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right there no freaking wonder in all the prep colin

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did for this video i don't think you saw this did you it's time to make an e-waste bin the

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next big re-org i want us to take every bin in every

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cable and run them through the cable tester

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we take all the ones that don't pass and we throw them away

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never to be seen again you guys might be thinking that sounds like a lot of work

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but compared to the amount of time that we waste trying to diagnose problems

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that are ultimately caused by a crappy cable

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oh let's have a look at how it's supposed to look with some cables that

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stand a better chance of passing is this our e-waste bin by the way

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see you later premium high-speed atc let's find out

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shall we

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oh my god all of these pins

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here are supposed to have ground connections for

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signal integrity and they just don't so while our signal integrity

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passes here what could happen to this cable is that it could stop working if

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there's something nearby that causes any kind of interference pretty crazy now i

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said that the signal integrity passed but clearly you can see looking at these

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charts that this is where the rubber hits the road from a science-y

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perspective so we're going to throw over to professor riley to explain what the

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heck we're looking at here thanks Linus eye diagrams are a visual representation

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of the voltage on a pair of wires these lines here are your signal when

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the signal is up here above the eye it's a one when it's below it's a zero and

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that's binary data baby this gray hexagon outline shape in the

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center is the eye and inside that is an

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eye mask in blue that's a no gozo if any of our signal

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lines enter the eye mask the receiving device won't be able to get a clean read

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of the signal which means the cable cannot be trusted

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now let's look at a perfect eye diagram every sample of our signal ends up

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stacked right over top of the last with no imperfections this would allow us to

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dramatically increase the clock speed of the signal faster signal more data

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unfortunately in the real world no two samples will end up exactly alike and

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there are two main ways signal noise affects a cable signal loss and jitter

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really big cards signal loss is pretty easy to understand as the length of the

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wire increases the voltage measured at the other end will fall due to the

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resistance of the wire if it drops to within the eye well that's game over

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baby that's why higher quality cables tend to use copper rather than aluminium

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due to its superior conductivity

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as for jitter well it's a little more complex but in a nutshell due to factors

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such as electromagnetic interference and processing delays it's normal for signal

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timing to vary this is mostly caused by the signal source and as you can imagine

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too much variance puts us closer to the eye and closer to signal lost city

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where data goes to die

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that's all for this lesson don't forget to hand in your homework

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bye bye now this one is poo poo

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here's one of our longer HDMI cables this is supposedly a 4k uhd cable so

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HDMI 2.0

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oh wow that's a pass oh wow

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you can see it's a a lot messier but oh

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that's really close that's what happens when you have a super thin cable that's

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longer though you got a worse conductor you get a worse freaking signal

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integrity either way it's a keeper i want to see how close it can get for

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HDMI 2.1 spec though

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zero percent measured do we have any of our HDMI 2.1 cables

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let's see if these cables we paid extra for for their HDMI

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2.1 capabilities are even any better

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that's fine just fine we got a keeper here this is your cable

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let's find out if you wasted your money andy there's no way it's going to do HDMI 2.1

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oh it's borderline look at that it's got 8 decibels 9

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decibels lost 13 on the final pair yeah

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that's pretty cool okay i'm in like cable testing mode here now

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okay who's who's buyer's point okay buyer's point made this HDMI supposedly

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2.1 cable you want to get called out buyer's point

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called out in a positive way so now that we know how all of that

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works does that mean we're gonna start reviewing cables

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well yes but actually no we're not just gonna

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take one cable and do a review of it that seems kind of ridiculous

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but because cables are one area of

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technology where snake oil and bs are still extremely prevalent i think

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there's a lot of good that we can do by casting light on brands or product lines

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that are not properly adhering to the standards and we want your guidance for

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how to use our newfound cable testing powers for good HDMI 2.1 absolutely on

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our hit list and usbc although

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boy is that ever going to be a count of worms and a half and if you guys have got other ideas go ahead and leave them

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down in the comments or hop over to our forum down below because we want to know

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what you want to see and since i'm telling you guys what to do go check out

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enjoyed this check out our video on how to make your own cables it's an

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underappreciated gem