Also a bad analogy. A slize of pizza has no onboarding cost for the user. You eat it and that is it. A PDF editor requires you to understand how to use it.
A better comparison would be a pizza shop at the end of a long hike that advertised itself online to offer infinite amount of free pizza. So you go on the hike and then it turns out you only get one slice and have to pay a fortune for the rest. You planned to get free food st the end of the hike, but it turns out the food you eventually will have to eat is not free and not even cheap.
One thing to realize is that especially for high resolution video cables these cheap testers can't really deliver. The way to test them is a eye diagram (see: https://incompliancemag.com/eye-diagram-part2/ ) and testers with that capsbility cost upwards of 10.000 Eurodollars.
Keysight are nice enough to provide prices on their web site for all their cheaper equipment. I priced out a setup for USB 2.0 eye diagram compliance testing on their site in this comment¹ and it's more like $40,000 than $10,000.
I said 10k because I think I saw a specialized product just for HDMI starting at roundabout that price bracket once mentioned in a youtube video, csn't really remember the brand, but it was relatively unknown in terms of test equipment. More generic (and flexible) equipment like the one mentioned will indeed tear a deeper hole into your pocket, but comes with its own perks.
No. What it can affect though is the bandwidth of the cable, meaning e.g. for HDMI cables, they might not support higher resolutions or framerates. If it's on the border you might see random disconnects or screen blanks.
The quality degrading is not something you will see, as it's a digital protocol.
"Audiophile grade" HDMI cables are likely to just be a Shenzhen bargain-bin special with some fancy looking sheathing and connectors. I would trust them less than an Amazon Basics cable.
Indeed. If I want super high quality cables, I get them from Blue Jeans Cables, who tell you exactly what Belsen or Can are cable stock and what connectors, as well as the assembly methodology.
These two statements aren't mutually exclusive. The link is looking at the analog signal through an oscilloscope. The person you replied to is pointing out that after decoding and applying error correction, you can still end up with the same digital signal output. So the eye diagram charts are useful for detecting the quality of the cable, but as long as the quality is past a certain threshold, it does not matter.
And that threshold is "baked in" to the eye mask pattern you load into the tester. If the eye stays out of the masked areas, it passes, if it goes into the masked areas it fails. Oscilloscopes capable of eye diagram testing can trigger on failure, so if it passes an eye test it'll reconstruct correctly with proper timing.
Correct. But especially if you're using long cables a cable with more "headroom" in the eye diagram will perform more reliable than one that is just at the edge of breakup.
For home use that doesn't matter usually, but I for example run events where I need the cable to work also after 10 people stepped on it and then this can become a significant thing.
No. What I am saying is that it is hard to test the quality of a 8K 240Hz 4444 video cable without having a device that can send and receive this or even higher.
If you send bits across a line fast enough you're grtting into the territory of RF electronics, with wrong connector or conductor geometry you will get echos on the line and all kind of signal loss. A good digital protocol should keep this at bay with error correction and similar mechanisms, but if you want to know what the good cable is on a better than binary scale of works/does not, you need to look at these things.
Well the thing is better doesn't mean better quality here. Better means you can use a longer cable or abuse the cable for longer till it dies.
This is a big part of what makes any pro gear expensive: reliability. If you just connect your home hifi to your speakers in an acoustically untreated space, you could also just use a bunch of steel wire coathangers and get an indistinguishable result. Even a el-cheapo store brand music shop cable will do the trick for years if you don't habitually change your setup four times a week (most people don't).
But if you need reliability and predictability in a studio or live context giving a damn about cable quality is mandatory since a broken cable in the wrong place can ruin your day and reputation. But it is an absolute myth that they will affect the sound in any meaningful way.
Exeption: guitar cables. The capacitance of guitar cables can shift the resonance frequency of the pickup up or down leading to audibly different results. But that id no magic either, you could just take a low capacitance cable and add in arbitrary capacitor for 10 cents as needed.
Sure shielding is important, especially for high impedance signsls or very small signals (e.g. microphone cables). But the difference in shielding between a 10€ cable and a 100€ cable is not going to be audible in anything but edge cases.
Gauge is only important if the driving or receiving sides suck or you're using ridiculously small gauges or driving high currents (e.g. speaker signals) for long distances. In my lab tests I drove line signals over a spool of hair thin wire without audible difference. A famous experiment that gave me a good chuckle came to similar results: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/copper-wire-vs-ba...
You could literally use CAT 6 ethernet cables and call it a day. There have been tests running balanced audio signals over a kilometer of ethernet cable without audible loss. And since you got 4 twisted pairs you could run 4 channels over one cable (commercially available here for example: https://store.monkeywrenchpro.com/thomann-5fc-cat-snake-spli...). I use this in combination with an ethernet patchbay to route signals around our event spaces and it works well even for unamplified mic level signals.
The worst connector IMO is the HDMI connector. I run the mediatec at an university and the amount of well-shielded cable I have to throw into the bin each semester because yet snother perdon levered off that plug is mindboggling.
On top of that, HDMI tries to be to much and do too much
On that topic, the 8pin modular ethernet plug has a number of downsides, but it has one huge upside that completely redeems it in my books.
It is super easy to field terminate ethernet. I wish all connector ends were as easy to replace. I have this vague boil-the-ocean type idea where we could replace usb with poe ethernet.
I have heard that story, but so far I have yet to see a broken USB-C plug. I have seen broken USB-C receptacles tho, levered off the PCB. But there are sturdy variants of those as well.
Murder is one thing, some superior telling you you cannot accept random PDFs sent to you via email for whatever reason and you following that policy is another.
Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.
If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.
I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.
There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also consider trusting them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive, in which case you might wanna give them a hint (e.g. by detailing how you would imagine it would work instead in terms of finances).
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also want trust them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive you run regularly.
A better comparison would be a pizza shop at the end of a long hike that advertised itself online to offer infinite amount of free pizza. So you go on the hike and then it turns out you only get one slice and have to pay a fortune for the rest. You planned to get free food st the end of the hike, but it turns out the food you eventually will have to eat is not free and not even cheap.
This is not free, it is s free trial.
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