Below Belief

The world has gone mad! Be careful: go into any electrical retailer in the UK and try and buy a HDMI cable. You’ll likely get suckered into the great HDMI swindle. It seems a giant cartel is in place – ensuring that no such shop can sell these cables with anything less than a 1000% markup. HDTV manufacturers are all in cahoots over this one – and as the price of the TV and DVD players fall, it seems they are attempting to recover their profit levels by drastically over pricing the connecting cables. Also notice that when you buy a HDTV, it usually doesn’t come with such a cable.

In Curry’s Hammersmith, the cheapest HDMI cable is £39.95. And the ones which are “better quality” (including gold plating), according to the helpful sales staff, can be had for £79.95.

Now, as any electrical engineer can tell you, HDMI is a digital cable. Digital cables transmit 1s and 0s using a low signal voltage. Provided the cable is actually an electrical conductor, there is absolutely no way that gold plating can make any difference to the “quality” of the received image. Even in the old days, with analogue signals which suffered more from interference and arguably could perhaps be improved by a low resistance conductor, the difference was detectible only by committed audiophiles.

You’ll be glad to know I gave the Curry’s sales assistant a snotty lesson in cable conductors for digital cables and then went online and bought one for £2.95.

Think for yourself and don’t get suckered.