'Digital' Co-ax

[davidsrsb]

Ask yourself just one question;

Can you hear the difference between two different analogue interconnects?

Which is not the issue here as the OP question is about digital cable

 

[Weirdness]

I've done coax digital cable swapping a number of times and there is a difference to my ears though the next person may not be interested in splitting hairs. I've also had gear that was more benign to cable swapping as well.

My current digital front end is a Bluesound Node 2i into a Schitt Yggdrasil, my default digital cable I've been using is a Black Cat Silverstar 75 - I recently decided to swap out the Silverstar for an Analysis Plus that I had tucked away, the Analysis plus was slow and veiled in comparison so I swapped back to the Black Cat after a few tracks as it had a lot more zip.

A few weeks later I remembered I had this cable that I bought used quite some time ago and quite liked a creative cable Green Hornet. It was without question a better sounding cable, the pace was there but it had a much more cohesive presentation, great tone and made the Black Cat sound a bit hard in comparison.

You can either buy a proper 75 ohm cable and be satisfied that it's passing signal or buy a few used ones at half of retail or less, play a few tracks and see if you hear any difference and sell without taking much of a hit.

You read again and again that HDMI cables make no difference whatsoever - I once swapped a cheapo cable for a Neotech silver over copper cable with the understanding that it 'may' improve the audio to my surround receiver, I swear I couldn't hear squat but the blacks and greys that previously looked mushy on my (cheap LG) plasma improved dramatically - movies like Batman took on a whole new life.

All I'm saying is you don't know until you try and trust no one - your ears will tell you well enough...

 

[Julf]

You read again and again that HDMI cables make no difference whatsoever - I once swapped a cheapo cable for a Neotech silver over copper cable with the understanding that it 'may' improve the audio to my surround receiver, I swear I couldn't hear squat but the blacks and greys that previously looked mushy on my (cheap LG) plasma improved dramatically - movies like Batman took on a whole new life.

They don't make a difference as long as they are good enough to actually work. Part of the initial configuration setup between host and receiving device includes stuff like colour palette and resolution negotiation. Data errors in that phase can result in the system using less demanding or non-ideal settings.

 

[Julf]

If you can hear a difference between two different analogue cables, then something must be different in how they transmit the data . . . . .

If you perceive a difference, it could be caused by an actual difference in the sound waves, and then something must be different in how they transmit the data. It could also be that there are no difference in the actual sound waves, but a difference in perception. In that case there probably isn't anything different in how they transmit the data.

 

[davidsrsb]

I once swapped a cheapo cable for a Neotech silver over copper cable with the understanding that it 'may' improve the audio to my surround receiver, I swear I couldn't hear squat but the blacks and greys that previously looked mushy on my (cheap LG) plasma improved dramatically - movies like Batman took on a whole new life.

HDMI is a complex protocol and there are several standards generations of cables. Use the wrong cable and the end to end negotiation can go wrong or be limited to a lower resolution.
SPDIF does not have any negotiation at all - -it either works or does not

 

[MJS]

There's absolutely no possible way an HDMI cable can change the vividness, black levels, or contrast of a digital video signal. The data is scrambled and encoded in such a way that any change to it renders the information useless. This manifests itself as broken pictures, coloured noise on screen, green or magenta lines and blocks, nasty audio, flashing images... I've spent half my career looking at this stuff.

By the way, serial digital video cables make great SP/DIF cables too. They're all rated at 75 ohm and the video guys take the specification very seriously.

 

[Strictly Stereo]

HDMI is a complex protocol and there are several standards generations of cables. Use the wrong cable and the end to end negotiation can go wrong or be limited to a lower resolution.
SPDIF does not have any negotiation at all - -it either works or does not

There's absolutely no possible way an HDMI cable can change the vividness, black levels, or contrast of a digital video signal. The data is scrambled and encoded in such a way that any change to it renders the information useless. This manifests itself as broken pictures, coloured noise on screen, green or magenta lines and blocks, nasty audio, flashing images... I've spent half my career looking at this stuff.

By the way, serial digital video cables make great SP/DIF cables too. They're all rated at 75 ohm and the video guys take the specification very seriously.

@MJS I agree with you. However, could the end to end negotiation that @davidsrsb mentions not result in what is effectively a progressive loss of picture quality, perhaps by restricting resolution or maybe in less obvious ways like switching from 10 bit to 8 bit colour, disabling HDR mode etc? Some of these playback option might also require the source to reprocess the video, which might also degrade picture quality.

 

[davidsrsb]

The sink sends EDID data back to the source, used for negotiating capabilities.
HDMI will downgrade the picture to low resolution if it cannot be sure of the encryption protection
This is down converting done by the source, not the cable or sink.
Anti-piracy paranoia.
https://www.firefold.com/blogs/news/edid-and-the-hdmi-handshake