 This is a high quality cable, right? You know, if I was doing a simple unboxing, I'd be fooled too. It's got a nice flexible sheath, sturdy strain relief boots, ferrite rings for signal filtering. I mean, it says high speed right on it. They wouldn't lie, would they? They wouldn't! It's a piece of crap! It's dead, it's gone! And how do we know? Thanks to Total Phase, who sent over their advanced cable tester V2. This thing is sick! Now, it's industrial equipment, so it's not the kind of thing we typically cover, but it costs a fraction as much as competing solutions, and we learned so much from using it that it absolutely deserves some time in the spotlight, just like our sponsor, GlassWire. Keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your PC, even when you aren't using it with GlassWire. If a strange device joins your Wi-Fi, you'll be notified instantly. So don't wait, save 25% by using code Linus at the link down below. So what you might say? You can test a cable, big whoop, wanna fight about it? Yeah, I do wanna fight about it. It's a very big whoop. We first explored the idea of doing LTT store cables a couple of years ago, but we ran into a major roadblock. While it's easy to find an overseas supplier who can produce every kind of cable under the sun, it can be very difficult, not to mention costly, to find a cable that can be used for a long time. So we're gonna test it. And we're gonna test it. And we're gonna test it. It's difficult, not to mention costly, to validate their work. You need an expensive oscilloscope, custom fixtures, and perhaps most importantly, a skilled operator. Or you can treat yourself to one of these. But what exactly do you get for your money? Well, a three amp, 12 volt power supply, all the associated cablery that's needed to operate the machine. A tiny little sheet outlining all of the reasons that Totalphase can invalidate your warranty. And the tester, of course, there's not really much to show on the outside. You got your power switch, you got a LAN and micro USB port on the back. There's no interface whatsoever. So there's a little LED here. This is a non-touchscreen. You don't actually interact with the unit at all, other than this slot right here. So on the inside, you've got these two female slots, and then the test boards for whatever type of interface you want. So this is an HDMI one, just pop in like this. And then they've got these little, like, what are they? Quarter of a turn, third of a turn lugs. So it looks like a big normal captive thumb screw, but actually it's just super, super fast to install. Let's poke around inside, shall we? Now that we've got this baby opened up, you can see the chassis is bigger than necessary, but not by much. All the mainboard traces and components are nicely laid out and labeled. So we've got 12 volt DC power coming in right about there, and it gets stepped down into 3.3 and five volt on these lines, where'd they go? There's 3.3 and there's five right about there. And they've worked some clever modularity into the design. Our test interface sockets, each with similar circuitry, come out right over, you know, and then they feed out into what appears to be the processor stack on a separate mezzanine board. We did, by the way, note a couple of manually soldered wires here, but Kyle from engineering says their I2C lines and won't affect anything. So presumably it's the kind of thing that wasn't worth spinning up another revision of the board for. What I suspect does the actual processing is this one right here and this one right here, because those are the ones they've scratched out. So yeah, this is doing some processing, but this is probably more of a general purpose processor, hosting the web server and maybe taking whatever the outputs of these are. This is actually quite normal. It's not like they scratched those out because they were sending them to the media. It's really common in the same kinds of places where cables get made, cable factories, for people to try to reverse engineer the tools that they need to make and validate cables. So obviously anything they can do to protect their IP from their customers even is probably a worthwhile step. In theory, this thing is so simple to use that literally anyone could validate pretty much any cable that they would find on a shelf. USB, Thunderbolt, Lightning, very, very frightening. DisplayPort and even HDMI all the way up to version 2.1, which is a blazing 48 gigabit per second across four twisted pairs. Let's give it a whirl on some of our many cables. We're at the size now where LMG owns a disturbing number of cables, like literally hundreds of them in every freaking style and every freaking size. Now we could test power cables, but in our experience, those have been mostly problem-free. Video cables on the other hand, especially long ones or specimens with odd terminations can and have given us issues over the years, like these monoprice DisplayPort cables. I don't know that this is going to fail, but I have a strong suspicion that it will. I remember our first standing desk configs in the editing den, we used these for the monitors and I remember them having a ton of problems with them. I'm starting with this DisplayPort cable because I am sure that there is something less suck about it. These horrible cables, these cost so many headaches or maybe it was something else. Now we're gonna know for sure. Just starts going, love it. I knew it, signal integrity, it sucks. Let's have a look at the full report though. So we wanna go into details here and things get real freaking interesting. On top of just pass fail, which is all most people would need to know, here we can dig into this interactive diagram pin by pin. We can make our way down through all the different ways that it could fail. So you can see our DC resistance is actually within spec and right there. No freaking wonder in all the prep Colin did for this video, I don't think you saw this, did you? It's time to make an e-waste bin. The next big reorg, I want us to take every bin in every cable and run them through the cable tester. We take all the ones that don't pass, we throw them away, never to be seen again. You guys might be thinking that sounds like a lot of work, but compared to the amount of time that we waste, trying to diagnose problems that are ultimately caused by a crappy cable. Let's have a look at how it's supposed to look with some cables that stand a better chance of passing. Is this our e-waste bin by the way? See you later. Premium high speed HTC. Let's find out, shall we? Oh my God. All of these pins here are supposed to have ground connections for signal integrity and they just don't. So while our signal integrity passes here, what could happen to this cable is that it could stop working if there's something nearby that causes any kind of interference. Pretty crazy. Now, I said that the signal integrity passed, but clearly you can see looking at these charts that this is where the rubber hits the road from a sciency perspective. So we're gonna throw over to Professor Riley to explain what the heck we're looking at here. Thanks Linus. Eye diagrams are a visual representation of the voltage on a pair of wires. These lines here are your signal. When the signal is up here above the eye, it's a one. When it's below, it's a zero. And that's binary data, baby. This gray hexagon outline shape in the center is the eye. And inside that is an eye mask in blue. That's a no gozo. If any of our signal lines enter the eye mask, the receiving device won't be able to get a clean read of the signal, which means the cable cannot be trusted. Now let's look at a perfect eye diagram. Every sample of our signal ends up stacked right over top of the last with no imperfections. This would allow us to dramatically increase the clock speed of the signal. Faster signal, more data. Unfortunately, in the real world, no two samples will end up exactly alike. And there are two main ways signal noise affects a cable, signal loss and jitter. These are really big cards. Signal loss is pretty easy to understand. As the length of the wire increases, the voltage measured at the other end will fall due to the resistance of the wire. If it drops to within the eye, well, that's game over, baby. That's why higher quality cables tend to use copper rather than aluminum due to its superior conductivity. I really made this up. As for jitter, well, it's a little more complex. But in a nutshell, due to factors such as electromagnetic interference and processing delays, it's normal for signal timing to vary. This is mostly caused by the signal source. And as you can imagine, too much variance puts us closer to the eye and closer to signal loss city where data goes to die. That's all for this lesson. Don't forget to hand in your homework. Bye-bye now. This one is poo poo. Here's one of our longer HDMI cables. This is supposedly a 4K UHD cable. So HDMI 2.0. Oh, wow. That's a pass. Oh, wow. You can see it's a lot messier, but, oh, that's really close. That's what happens when you have a super thin cable that's longer though. You got a worse conductor, you got a worse freaking signal integrity. Either way, it's a keeper. I wanna see how close it can get for HDMI 2.1 spec though. Zero percent measured. Do we have any of our HDMI 2.1 cables? Let's see if these cables we paid extra for for their HDMI 2.1 capabilities are even any better. That's fine, just fine. We got a keeper here. This is your cable. Let's find out if you wasted your money, Andy. There's no way it's gonna do HDMI 2.1. Oh, it's borderline. Look at that, it's got eight decibels, nine decibels, lost 13 on the final pair. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Okay. I'm in like cable testing mode here now. Okay, who's Buyers Point? Okay, Buyers Point made this HDMI supposedly 2.1 cable. You wanna get called out Buyers Point? Called out in a positive way. So now that we know how all of that works, does that mean we're gonna start reviewing cables? Well, yes, but actually no. We're not just gonna take one cable and do a review of it. That seems kind of ridiculous. But because cables are one area of technology where Snake Oil and BS are still extremely prevalent, I think there's a lot of good that we can do by casting light on brands or product lines that are not properly adhering to the standards. And we want your guidance for how to use our new found cable testing powers for good. HDMI 2.1, absolutely on our hit list. And USB-C, although, boy is that ever gonna be a can of worms and a half. And if you guys have got other ideas, go ahead and leave them down in the comments or hop over to our forum down below because we wanna know what you wanna see. And since I'm telling you guys what to do, go check out our sponsor. Do you think you don't need a website? Well, that's a lie. And Squarespace has got you covered. You can make any website you want and it's easy to do with Squarespace. They have award-winning templates that will help make your website stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s. And if you're looking to open up a business online selling products, they've got you covered there too. Squarespace can help you showcase what you're selling in a modern style. They've got inventory management built right into the platform. And there's no limit on how many items you can sell. We even use Squarespace. Both our Linus Media Group and LTX Expo websites were built quickly using Squarespace. And if you ever get stuck, they've got a 24 seven support team that is ready to help you out. So head to squarespace.com forward slash LTT and get 10% off at the link below. If you guys enjoyed this, check out our video on how to make your own cables. It's an underappreciated gem.