 We told you we would test the most popular HDMI cables. 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... A thousand-ish dollars. A thousand dollars. 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. After this message from our sponsor, Honey, who helps you not get ripped off on anything. Honey is the free-to-use shopping tool that helps search for some of the best promo codes on lots of your favorite sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Ask a cable vendor and naturally, they'll claim that their product does everything from dissipating noise to reducing EMI interference to turning water into wine. 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 Guaranteed 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 need spec. And 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. 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 Hertz 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 whack load 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 because that's the latest and greatest. But because neither Amazon Basics 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? They both work. Wow, Colin, that's a lot of tests. Yeah, it was a lot. Something is there's more than 53 here. Yeah, I also went around the office and grabbed some interesting cables just to see what would happen. They're down at the bottom, it's promise. 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, Delkin, Monoprice, Amazon Basics and Cable Decon. Doing the math here, that is a 16.9% failure rate. 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. Amazon basics 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 pass the HDMI 2.0 spec, but they also pass the HDMI 2.1 spec at 48 gigabit per second. That's pretty good. That makes Amazon basics six footers one of the best bang for the buck cables on the market, but not quite the best. 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 audio file 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, maybe snaps. This appears to be the grain of truth upon which modern audio file 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. Oh, nice hoodie by the way. LGTstore.com. You better believe it. WanHoodie 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 cost me a tear inducing $8 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 Cable Decon. 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 y'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 audio file 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. Woo! Woo! I'm actually super stoked. And I'm stoked to tell you about our sponsor. Manscaped provides an all-in-one grooming kit that has you covered from head to toe. Their performance package 4.0 features their Lawn Mower 4.0 waterproof body trimmer, their Weed Whacker ear and nose trimmer, plus a whole lot of other goodies. For a limited time, you get all of this plus two free gifts, the Shed travel bag and a pair of Manscaped anti-chafing boxer briefs. Just visit manscaped.com slash tech or click the link down below for 20% off and free shipping. 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.