<story><title>Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)</title><url>http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-rip1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>micks56</author><text>My patience for the line, &quot;It is digital. It either works or it doesn&apos;t&quot; ended a long time ago.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Digital&quot; signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold there is a gray area where you can&apos;t really tell whether your signal will be interpreted as 1 or 0.&lt;p&gt;I am not defending the need for high-end HDMI cables. But saying &quot;It&apos;s digital so don&apos;t worry&quot; is wrong.&lt;p&gt;There are reasons that &quot;digital&quot; cables use twisted pair. Wow, even some &quot;digital&quot; cable standards specify the number of twists per inch required for reliable operation. And wow, some cable standards even specify shielded cable is required. I wonder why.&lt;p&gt;Here is a fun exercise for those that think &quot;digital&quot; signals don&apos;t need engineering steps to protect signal integrity: build all of your cables (or PCBs for that matter) with straight signals and you will have an excellent time trying to debug why your communications don&apos;t work. Bonus fun for making the cable length 1/4 of your signal wavelength.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matwood</author><text>I think the point of the &quot;either works or it doesn&apos;t&quot; is a comparison versus analog.  With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables).  If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn&apos;t work.  If the cable you&apos;re using works, buying a more expensive cable isn&apos;t going to make it work any better.  Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destination or they didn&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;No one is claiming that there isn&apos;t engineering that needs to happen to make a digital signal reliably travel from the source to the receiver.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic)</title><url>http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-rip1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>micks56</author><text>My patience for the line, &quot;It is digital. It either works or it doesn&apos;t&quot; ended a long time ago.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Digital&quot; signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold there is a gray area where you can&apos;t really tell whether your signal will be interpreted as 1 or 0.&lt;p&gt;I am not defending the need for high-end HDMI cables. But saying &quot;It&apos;s digital so don&apos;t worry&quot; is wrong.&lt;p&gt;There are reasons that &quot;digital&quot; cables use twisted pair. Wow, even some &quot;digital&quot; cable standards specify the number of twists per inch required for reliable operation. And wow, some cable standards even specify shielded cable is required. I wonder why.&lt;p&gt;Here is a fun exercise for those that think &quot;digital&quot; signals don&apos;t need engineering steps to protect signal integrity: build all of your cables (or PCBs for that matter) with straight signals and you will have an excellent time trying to debug why your communications don&apos;t work. Bonus fun for making the cable length 1/4 of your signal wavelength.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrcharles</author><text>The point is not that you can use anything, the point is that you only need a certain level, and then it&apos;s good enough.  All my HDMI cables are from monoprice.com, I don&apos;t think I paid more than $4 for a single cable, and I can&apos;t imagine what kind of EM interference I&apos;d need to mess with them.  I have so many electronics in my house I&apos;m probably on a watch list.</text></comment>