Benefits of using an HD Cable

HD Cable

By Anne Ahira

Cables will always be the electrical components that complicate setups especially when setting up home theater systems since the speakers, amplifiers, media players, and television all need to be hooked up properly in order for each component to function in harmony.

The worst thing that can happen is that if one or more of the components aren’t working, much work needs to be done when it comes to cable rewiring and tracing.

Since wireless setups can be a bit expensive, the next best thing is to simplify the setup with modern cables like the HD cable.

Although HD cables are pricey, they provide several benefits that are exclusive to modern devices that revolve around the latest high definition audio and video technologies

Maximum Resolution

More commonly referred to as an HDMI (High-definition Multimedia Interface) cable, HD cables initially had a 165 MHz pixel clock rate which is required to support the maximum 1080p and WUXGA resolutions. Now the latest standard boosts it to 340 MHz for supporting an even higher resolution at 2560 x 1600.

Still the 1080p is the key feature here as 1080p supported devices including the latest video gaming consoles, Blu-ray players, and certain digital camera and camcorder models can connect to televisions and computer monitors that have the Full HD specification.

Component video cables can actually do the same as well, but that leads to the second major benefit of using an HD cable.

Clean Interface that Includes Uncompressed Sound

The most significant advantage over older cables like the component cables is the capability of transferring both video and audio through a single cable. The audio also happens to be uncompressed sound which means much better sound quality outputs. The 8 audio channels that it supports indicate that an HD cable is the complete solution for connectivity.

Cables can be of various lengths and are a bit thick, but the clean interface surprisingly serves as a replacement to many of the older analog standards such as coaxial cables, S-Video cables, SCART, composite video, VGA, and D-Terminal.

Growing Compatibility

In 2003, hundreds of consumer electronic devices started to adopt the HDMI specification that these HD cables rely on. That number has grown to nearly 400 million devices that have at least one HDMI port.

Future devices are sure to implement HDMI as the preferred interface although many devices still offer alternatives in case an HD cable isn’t available for compatibility purposes.

In addition, HDMI remains compatible with the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that was introduced in previous years. By using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, top quality can be experienced without any need for signal conversions which means no toll on the video quality.

HDMI cables used to be very pricey, but since they are now becoming more standard than ever before, these cables are being sold for $20 or sometimes less. Amazon.com is a great place to find HD cables of various lengths usually ranging from 6 ft to 25ft. Having a spare HD cable is always good for setting up a new home media component with ease.

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