To the power cable guy:
So - did you also run $800/5ft wire to your breaker box, to the pole outside the house, and all the way to the nearest substation?  Or do you run your own AC generator and have $800/5ft wire in it wired into your house?  Did you also break open every audio/video component you have, strip out their crappy wiring and copper clad PCBs to run your $800/5ft AC wire straight to the component’s transformer?  Baka ie!!!

Fortunately, in the digital transmission world, these audiophile nuts can’t make all the claims and still sound intelligent. 

I have 30’ Molex HDMI cables that I run from my TV to my receiver, then simple HDMI cables go from it to my PS3, DVD, Tivo3, and HTPC.  1080p works just fine, and I didn’t have to take a second mortgage out on my house to afford it all (not all AV geeks are uber-rich). 
In fact, if you strip away the nonsense and pay attention to what matters, you can afford a great system without selling your children on the street.

This Honeywell cable is probably all well and good, I’m sure it regenerates the signal and clock and accounts for timing errors and such, but if it’s too expensive then it’s crap.  If not, then I’d try it if I was having problems - which I’m most happy to say I’m not. 

End of story - it’s stupid to pay for more than you need.  I don’t care how much money you make - if you spend $100 a foot for HDMI cables your getting robbed and/or just plain gullible.

Usually the sme people that believe a cable is a cable is a cable also own a $299 receiver (it sounds as good as those 2 thousand dollar ones I swear!) or they own an HTIB and tell people” these speaker’s sound as good as the real expensive one’s in the store”. So frankly, they CAN’T tell the difference in cables because there equipment can’t tell the difference. SH** in=SH** out as they say. My power cord’s run $800 for 5 ft (biggest improvement I ever heard was a power cord upgrade) and I find you can get awfully good sound for $150 a ft in interconnects. If you want a great HDMI cable you can pick up a Cardas 1M for $75-and a 3M only runs $115. Cables count.

Yes, the cables are digital but it doesn’t mean it’s as simple as a “1” or a “0”.  If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, and Cat6a.  Never heard of Cat6a?  That’s because hardly anyone can afford it or really have a need for it.  Only a couple of high rise buildings in Manhattan are implementing it.  It stands for Cat6 augmented and prevents cross talk between the paris.

In the world of HDMI, there are different grades of cable to support distance and bandwith.  The exact same thing applies to category cable so this shouldn’t come as a suprise to anyone.  A $5 HDMI cable may be fine for someone who’s connecting a 720p or 1080i source over a distance of 1 foot.  However, reliably passing a high bandiwth 1080p signal over a long run requires a really good cable.  Anything over 30ft, in fact, requires an active HDMI cable that is powered to support a longer run.  HDMI is also very succeptable to interference.

This is not to say that as a custom electronic installer, I charge my customers $100 for a 1 foot HDMI cable.  I avoid all the marketing hype that some companies try to push on people.  For me, those companies must go unnamed.  I’ve researched the market and I buy a high quality cable (Honeywell Genesis) that has a very reasonable price.  It’s less than half those cost of its well known competitors.  What’s most important is, the current Honeywell Genesis HDMi cables come with an eye pattern test to show the quality of the cable and it’s ability to pass a clean 1080p signal.  No other HDMI manufacturer, that I know of, does this but it’s the only test pattern that matters in the HDMI world.

I’m looking forward to this new Genesis cable.  Their current HDMI cables are white (poor choice of color in my opinion) and the head on the cables is a bit large which can be a bit inconvenient when handing a display on the wall.  I realize it’s their first venture into making HDMI cables, but making them right, and future versions will address some of the these issues.

with reference to TimC - you must be that Best Buy kid :)

Listen to Mike B, who (like me) works in the industry (I mean designing equipment - not selling it).  But I guess people with MSEE degrees talk too much about things they know nothing about…

I’m an engineer for a company that makes professional digital audio equipment.  With the frequencies in use by HDMI, those 1s and 0s aren’t just “on” (voltage) and “off” (no voltage) any more.  Each time the voltage switches between high (1) and low (0), there is some delay before the voltage actually reaches that level.  This is called rise time/fall time, and is caused by the combined resistance, inductance, and capacitance of the transmitter, cable, and receiver.  If the rise and fall time get too slow, the receiving device (the TV) can’t tell the difference between a 1 and a 0, causing signal degradation.  There are other problems that can lead to the inability to reliably detect 1s and 0s.  I’m not saying you need to spend a fortune on digital cable (if it’s working at all, it’s probably working perfectly), just that it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially because of some of the poorer design decisions made with HDMI/DVI.