this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
103 points (62.8% liked)
Technology
59111 readers
4050 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You have a point with HDMI because that's a digital cable.
Ethernet is also a digital cable.
Cable quality when it comes to digital doesn't matter, but with analog it is far more sensitive to the quality of the materials used.
The walkmans are fine, I actually have an NW-A306 ($350). To be 100% clear, the other walkmans are PRETTY MUCH the same, you are mostly paying for a better build than anything. It's a quality device but it isn't like you really need anything better.
Your money is better spent on speakers or headphones over anything else. You can have the fastest car in the world but it doesn't mean anything if you don't have tires that can handle it.
A digital cable that meets spec can't be made better by gold plating or other bling. But a sub spec cable or a cable with some aspect degraded by damage or wear or contamination will introduce errors that will force the system to use whatever error correction is built in(such as with tcpip) that will hinder data speed. So, you can have a digital cable that works slower than spec but still "works". Especially when you are running any sort of significant distance or there is noise such as fromn ac power.
My point is that even with digital connections a better cable can make a difference. Just on the low end not the high end.
Oh yes most definitely. Thank you for clarifying and I 100% agree with that. I have had to deal with that first hand as I work as a network administrator and have had cheap "Cat6" cabling come and be wired right, but used aluminum which not only hindered the speeds but actually made the cable run HOT (probably fine in air but a fire hazard in a wall, this was plenum too).
Bad cable quality is for sure going to hinder performance, but yes, a $1000 gold HDMI cable (scam to begin with because gold wiring isn't even that expensive) is silly. Funny because that cable is actually worse than standard HDMI cables now because of the current spec (think that $1000 cable was like 1.4 or something)
A very informative video on Linus tech tips where they ran a cable tester on lots of different cables. Super interesting.
I always tell people to get the full solid copper core cat6, no stranded, no copper clad.
At least for the important projects.