- Feb 22, 2007
- 16,240
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Most here know about the monster cable price rip-offs and the over priced high end cables that are advertised. This past weekend I had to do something unthinkable to the 'must spend $100 on a cable' crowd. I was helping someone set up a projector for a presentation they had to do and during the process asked him for the HDMI cables, he handed them to me and they were the wrong cables. There were several different cables laying about and the ones that were brought were 2- 10 ft cables instead of the one 25ft. It was only about 30 minutes before the presentation started and no time to go and get the other cable and being a rural area there was no chance of buying one locally.
I pulled out my wire cutters and cut off one end of each cable to my friends horror. I then stripped back both cables about 6 inches and began twisting wire pairs together , covered each connection with a bit of tape and then taped the whole thing to the cable with another couple feet of tape, done, not pretty, but done. The cable worked fine, absolutely perfect , just like it were a $100 monster cable. No shielding in place between wires, no special gold solder, no careful routing of the wire pairs to avoid cross talk.
HDMI is a lot more forgiving than most realize. It does have error correction built in to the protocol so even the worst of cables are likely to work as long as you don't go so extreme with 100ft cables that cause a voltage drop, which any signal will have problems with, not just HDMI.
I pulled out my wire cutters and cut off one end of each cable to my friends horror. I then stripped back both cables about 6 inches and began twisting wire pairs together , covered each connection with a bit of tape and then taped the whole thing to the cable with another couple feet of tape, done, not pretty, but done. The cable worked fine, absolutely perfect , just like it were a $100 monster cable. No shielding in place between wires, no special gold solder, no careful routing of the wire pairs to avoid cross talk.
HDMI is a lot more forgiving than most realize. It does have error correction built in to the protocol so even the worst of cables are likely to work as long as you don't go so extreme with 100ft cables that cause a voltage drop, which any signal will have problems with, not just HDMI.
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