I'm simply aghast that people think and HDMI cable is an HDMI cable. For one braided cable can cause slight distortion due to the "gaps between strands, not with solid copper. Improved strength through stamped connectors, not soldered. I've sat with many customers going back and forth and there is a definite improvement in clarity. I know many of you guys are extremely well schooled about a lot of things we talk about on here, but on this one, I'm standing my ground. I see the difference all the time.
Regardless, while the video is arguably better, there's no questioning the benefit of audio. Sure, places like Best Buy pass off HDMI cables for upwards of 100 bucks or better.
So AQ came in to demo their cables. The guy has a Hopper 3 with the Polk system we carry, freebie HDMI and Optical cables and plays a Youtube video of some folk singer doing a song in a night club. Starts out playing acoustic guitar, then starts singing, sounds pretty good. Then he switches to the AQ Pearl HDMI cable we have and starts over. Now you can hear people in the audience that you couldn't hear before. Then does the same with an AQ Optical cable, and now you almost make out what they're saying, hear a cook in the background ring a bell for an order up - that you couldn't hear previously, then a cell phone that wasn't there before. I did the same test on my setup and the audio was remarkably better. A cable is not just a cable
Hipkat, here is an article that discusses why the audio can not be selectively filtered based on the HDMI cable.
Audio
Several companies claim that their HDMI cables sound better than other HDMI cables. One in particular claims this is because there is no error correction on the audio and its cables are more likely to transmit all the data.
First of all, this is untrue. Audio over HDMI actually has more error correction than the video signal. But even if this weren't the case, it's still utter nonsense. Dolby has extensive error correction built into its codecs. In other words, if you are sending the Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, or whatever bitstream over HDMI from your Blu-ray player, the data going into the DAC in your receiver is bit-for-bit the same as what's on the disc. DTS presumably works in the same way, though the company ignored my repeated requests for info. Cheap or expensive, the cable is irrelevant when it comes to transmitting Dolby or DTS.
If the cable is faulty or if there is some cataclysm causing data to be lost between the player and the receiver, the decoders are designed to mute instead of blasting out compromised data. There is no such thing as an audio version of "sparkles." Instead, you just get a total dropout of the audio. So if you're getting audio dropouts, it's possible it's the HDMI cable. But if you're not getting video issues as well, the problem is likely elsewhere. If the audio isn't muting, then as long as you're outputting an audio codec, you're getting exactly what's on the disc.
If you're playing a CD on a Blu-ray player, the output is PCM to the receiver. This data is packetized, just like the rest of the audio and video signal. As such, it is error-corrected. However,
jitter is far more likely than with an optical or coax connection. In discussions with several audio equipment manufacturers since the original publication of this article, I've been told by all of them that the
DAC in the receiver is going to have a far greater effect on the sound than the jitter in the transmission. Before you leap on that, keep in mind that the
DAC has a smaller effect on the sound than the amp, the speakers, and definitely less than the room itself.
Oh, and in case that wasn't clear, the jitter is inherent in the HDMI transmission itself. The cable isn't going to have any effect.
