Please read this, I feel it’s important for many of us looking for the best picture. I have a lot I want to say but I’ll try to keep it as short as I can.
I agree with you 100%. Anyone can disagree with me if you want and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think many people are stuck back in the analog days. Let me explain analog and digital as I see it.
ANALOG:
Remember ghosting, shadows, static, snow on your old TV? With digital television, these do not exist unless it was filmed/mastered that way (and who in their right mind would do that). The only quality loss will/should be within the wall of your home. (Don’t argue with me yet, wait till I’m done. My main focus is what is said after this sentence.) Having said that, the only instance where more expensive and/or more clean/pure cables would make a difference is with analog connections. For example, monster cable, compared to “cheap” cable manufacturers, usually uses higher gauge wires and a more pure/clean metal for those wires (the wires that make up the cable internally) to eliminate interference and dissipation/loss of the signal caused by the impurities in the metal that makes up the wires. I think in cases of analog connections (Component, S-Video, RCA/Composite) a more expensive cable “might” make a difference and your picture quality “can” vary depending on the cable used (not guaranteed that it will with brand x cable compared to brand y, but it might). People stuck in analog mode think this way, and why not? Prior to digital television, we’ve been watching TV the same way since its invention in the early 1900’s.
Before a digital video signal is transmitted over an analog cable (Component, S-Video, RCA/Composite) it must be “translated” into an analog signal. To illustrate, it’s like your old 56K dial-up: analog phone lines & a digital computer. I know translated isn’t the technical term, but I’ll use it for those who aren’t technically minded so they can better understand. When the signal reaches the destination, it must then be “retranslated” from analog back into a digital signal to be displayed on the screen. If something happened to the analog signal as it traveled down the cable then the translation back to digital would result in a different signal than what was originally sent since it was translated from an “altered” analog signal.
Let me use a child’s game to illustrate my point. Have you ever played the game “telephone”? The one where you get multiple people sitting in a line or circle (analogous to our analog cable) and one person makes up a short sentence and whispers it into the ear of the person to the left. If the person listening didn’t hear something quite right or missed a word, the speaker cannot repeat the message. The listener must try their best to repeat what was heard, no second chances of hearing the message. They in turn whisper what they think the message is into the ear of the next person and so on until it reaches the last person who then tells everyone aloud the message he or she received. The person who made up the message then tells everyone the original message and everyone gets a laugh because the message is almost always different. You can also compare the messages everyone sent along to find out where the changes occurred. This is analogous to all HDTV video and audio signals: the signals get sent once and the television tries its best to recreate the original or intended signals. If something happened between the source and destination then you’re loosing/altering the intended signal, or picture in this case.
DIGITAL:
First off, I am only talking about cables that are manufactured according to specification. I imagine there are a few cables that are manufactured incorrectly due to automation (something went wrong with that particular cable or design from the start).
What many people forget to think about is the technology used. No matter the cable used (to transport digital signals) and what salesmen say, your picture can’t get any better than the digital technology used. For example: here’s an outrageous salesman claim I read on the internet:
Some guy in Japan (or around there) invented a way to make a CD (which is a digital source) using glass instead of the plastics used to make CDs today. His first glass CD was, I believe, one of Beethoven’s or Bach’s symphonies. His claim of it lasting longer than plastic CDs is true, but it ends there. He claimed that his $1,000 CD would sound better, as if you were there at the concert hall listening to the live symphony.
This is the salesman gig, trying to sell more expensive items that gets ooh’s and aah’s but only for its media “type” (glass vs. plastic, OR in our case, fancy monster cables vs. cheaper cables). The sound quality of the glass CD cannot exceed its technology. Both plastic CDs and glass CDs are both digital and share the same technology: 16-bit PCM at 44.1 kHz. That’s the best it can get. To get better sound you need a new technology such as DVD-Audio: up to 24-bit at 192 kHz. (I know that better analog speakers could sound better, but it’s not the digital technology that’s making the difference.)
The glass CD example is like comparing our fancy HDMI monster cables and cheaper HDMI cables: they share the exact same digital technology. The reason why I keep saying digital is because of my claim above: analog signals are subject to loss/interference. I don’t know the specific voltage levels of the HDMI specification, but digital bits are represented as higher or lower voltage level (can be positive vs. negative voltages). If we use 24K gold wires or cheap copper wires to transport digital bits the picture on the other end will look exactly the same. I admit that, with the cheaper copper wire, the voltage level at the destination might be a tenth (an extreme circumstance) or a hundredth of a percent lower than the gold wire because of the impurities in the copper cable. An example: if the HDMI specifications stated that it must send its digital bits with voltage levels of +1.0 and -1.0 for the 1’s and 0’s, a very cheap copper cable might diminish the signal to voltages of +0.9 and -0.9 by the time it reached the destination. Both of the bits are just as discernable as the intended signal.
If you played the same telephone game by passing a bit (maybe if someone’s hand were open for 1 or closed for 0) instead of analog signal (sounds/words as we speak) then it would be almost guaranteed that there would be no mistake in the transition from start to end. Digital signals are subject to the same problems analog signals are.
Please leave comments!
-GWolfman
Yes, I also did component lever repair…
( I bought it in 2000)…
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