- We told you we would test the most popular HDMI cables.
(energetic music)
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-
- [Colin] A thousand-ish dollars.
- $1000.
And after painstakingly labeling,
testing, and logging all of them,
we've got the juicy details for you.
Which ones are top notch?
Which ones aren't even worthy of being used
as a skipping rope?
We're gonna tell you and also give you some guidelines
that you can follow to make sure
that you are not getting ripped off on cables.
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Ask a cable vendor and naturally,
they'll claim that their products does everything
from dissipating noise to reducing EMI interference
to turning water into wine. (energetic music)
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 gonna 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 then we'll 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 discernible 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 one and category two cables, for example,
both have four twisted pairs to carry color,
sync, 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 three spec, by contrast,
includes this fifth twisted pair as 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. (suspenseful music)
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 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 whackload
of cables from the usual suspects: Amazon, Best Buy,
Monoprice, 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 fluke.
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
'cause that's the latest and greatest.
But because neither AmazonBasics
nor Best Buy's Insignia brand offer HDMI 2.1 cables,
we decided to test those 2.0 rated cables as well.
I mean, they're both category three, right?
Maybe it'll work.
Wow, Colin, that's a lot of tests.
- [Colin] Yeah, it was a lot.
- Something is there's more than 53 here.
- [Colin] Yeah, 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: Belkin, Monoprice,
AmazonBasics, and CableDeconn.
Doing the math here, that is a 16.9, nice,
percent failure rate. (energetic music)
That means that the odds of buying
an out of spec 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 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 Chromecast.
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 feet or more.
Let's start with the most surprising of our failures.
AmazonBasics 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-foot cables,
it's not that surprising.
What is surprising though is that these three,
numbers 25, 26 and 27, all of which are six-foot cables,
not only passed the HDMI 2.0 spec, but they also passed
the HDMI 2.1 spec at 48 gigabit per second.
That's pretty good.
That makes AmazonBasics six footers
one of the best bang for the buck cables on the market,
but not quite the best. (energetic music)
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 Monoprice,
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 15 foot 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 consistently 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 audiophile 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.
Baby snaps. (energetic music)
This appears to be the grain of truth
upon which modern audiophile 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 eye is.
A one or a zero is measured at this point.
As jitter increases, 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 sparklies 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, Linus, ooh, nice hoodie, by the way.
Lttstore.com.
- You better believe it. (energetic music)
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 Belkin.
It costs me a tear-inducing 8 dollars and 41 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 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 CableDeconn.
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 that's 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 feet
with HDMI 2.1, you're asking for trouble.
Only 50% of our 15 foot 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 gonna wanna 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 you 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 audiophile 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 wanna 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 gonna do with all these HDMI cables?
Actually, I know.
I'm gonna replace all the bad ones
that have been causing intermittent problems
for us here at the office for the last seven years.
- [Colin] Woo-hoo.
- Woo.
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.