So, you just got that new 4k HDTV and you’re wondering how you’re going to feed it right? AHAHAHA. Yeah, right. Well, Sony has slashed $1000 off the price of their entry level model to a mere $4000, but if you’ve held on to your purse strings this long, you should probably wait a bit longer for the full adoption of the new standard.
Yay!!!
Er, I mean, if I was able to afford any of this tech…
What I want to know is, if they’re charging over 200 bucks for a 2m cable now - which I assume is just HDMI 1.4 - then Jesus, what are they going to try to butt rape me for when they might have something approaching a legit excuse for charging a little more?
At some point you have to wonder just what all that technology is going to do that is worthwhile. I mean, I don’t sit in front of my modest stereo hi-fi saying, “Gee, if only I had a few dozen more channels, this would really sound good!” And audio sampling or reproduction above 44khz is unlikely to deliver anything meaningful for our pitiful and aging human ears, so 1536kHz is really overkill.
Of course, if you build it, they will come. The uses, that is.
You’ll get a lot of people who disagree with you on the 44khz thing. I only listen to flac recordings as a general rule but those times when I’ve had to listen to mp3’s, it’s usually been a somewhat unpleasant experience by comparison. The sound seems muddy and indistinct by comparison and you seem to get artifacts that I don’t normally notice.
But I’m not going to argue this to the death since I’m hardly an audiophile. I do have a pretty good system in my office (NHT speakers) and decent one for my home theater (Polk) but it’s not like I do a lot blind A-B comparisons.
What I want to know is whether the new standard will allow for closed-captioning to be sent over the cable. The current standard doesn’t support closed captioning. So if you want to see the captions, you have to turn them on at the cable box. On mine, the process is so complicated that I never turn on closed captions. Enabling captioning should require only a single button press.
They discuss the issue here (first question) and seem to say the issue is really with how CC is handled. It seems to be decoded by whichever device decodes the digital signal, so if that’s a set top box, then that’s why you have to turn it on there. IDK, I just gave it a quick scan.
I know, but I hoped that the HDMI Forum might have addressed this question in designing the new standard.
Oh, you’re hoping that devices might someday talk to each other.
Silly dreamer. 
That’s me; the eternal optimist.
BTW, I just tried it. Comcast has simplified the process of enabling captions, so that it only required about half a dozen button presses. That’s better than the old process:
Turn on the TV
Turn off the DVR
Press the Menu button, on the Comcast remote (or on the Comcast box)
You will see the USER SETTING screen on your TV
Move down to the CLOSED CAPTIONS entry using the arrow buttons
Press the right-arrow to switch between ENABLED and DISABLED
Press the Menu button
Turn on the DVR
Easy as pie!
MP3s are different from straight sampling (like WAV files), not only for sampling rates, but for compression artifacts. If you’re not familiar with Nyquist, I suggest you check out that term. If you are, then our only difference is in subjective listening.
I assume you’re talking about psychoacoustics. I’m generally familiar with the concept and it’s use in lossy compression and yes I realize I was being imprecise. But I figured you would get the point I was making. Flac recordings for example normally use at least double the sampling rate of CD’s plus use lossless compression.
Don’t buy HDMI cables from anyplace other than monoprice.com
Here, have a 25 footer for less than $17.
Thanks. That’s what I’ve always heard. Not about that vendor specifically but that any decent cable is just fine.
I use no name HDMI cables to pipe the digital audio from my video cards to my receivers in both my office and for my home theater and bypass the cheesy onboard chipsets completely. I don’t understand why people even bother with sound cards any more, especially if you want multichannel.
I do not really get the upgrading of connection types like this. Where is the room for improvement? I mean, ultimately the cable is just a bunch a copper wires isn’t it?* There can’t be much you can do to improve that technology. You can have more wires running in parallel, but that is not any sort of big technological leap, and if more are better, why didn’t they use more in the first place, and why wasn’t the available bandwidth, from the start, close to the physical limit of whatever a flexible copper cable can handle reliably? Are improvements like this really, ultimately software improvements (even if it takes a new chip to implement the software): a better, more efficient way of compressing and uncompressing the data to send it down the wire, or something like that? If that is not it, what is really going on?
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*If they are really optical fibre or something, rather than copper, the argument still goes the same. Where is the room for massive bandwidth improvement from one version to another? Why wasn’t the available bandwidth the maximum the medium (copper, fibre, whatever) in the first place?
I am not familiar with the details of Flac, but I once heard an A/B comparison (not blinded) in a professional audio studio of an uncompressed digital recording vs. a MP3 conversion (and I don’t remember the tech specs, either, but we had an excellent engineer at the board, and he had no ax to grind). To professional ears, on top-notch equipment, in a studio environment, there was a very subtle difference, and the difference was due not to sample rate, but MP3 lossy compression. That’s the best comparison I’ve ever heard, and if it hadn’t been A/B, I think it would have been unnoticed.
I’ve never heard an equivalent sample rate comparison, but I’m dubious about extremely high rates.
That is all.
I’ve bought several HDMI cables from “Poundland” here in the UK. Care to guess how much they cost?
1.5m in length and all work perfectly. Give it a year after HDMI 2 comes into play and the same will be true of that standard too. It’s only digital. It works or it doesn’t.
I haven’t paid over $5 for an HDMI cable in years…
I’ll be damned if I’m gonna start paying hundreds just so I can have a 32 channel audio system in my tiny ass apartment.
does anyone even produce anything that has sounds in 32 separate channels???
Cool. Can’t wait to watch 720p Netflix movies on one of these babies!
Sometimes, it’s the technical ability to run at higher speeds - being able to track the 0s and 1s faster, effectively. USB full speed and USB high speed effectively use the same protocol, but with a massively different clock rate. You may need to tighten up the shielding on the cables and route your signals a little better to make it work.