HDMI Cables; Going bad after a few days is that possible?

Question

I have a 1080P TV (Westinghouse), Sony Receiver (1080P), and a Sony upscaling DVD (1080P). I bought two cables to close the triangle (HDMI from the DVD to the Receiver, and another from the Receiver to the TV). I watched a movie perfectly on Sunday. Today I begin to watch another movie and I turn on the DVD and Receiver. To my surprise, I have to picture. I can hear through the surround sound just fine but no picture. I switched cables around, changed settings, and called Sony Tech. Nothing worked! Their response was that my cables are bad because I can use the regular cables and get picture. Now is this possible for HDMI cables (brand new) stop working. Honestly, two HDMI cables is a little over $100 bucks and they go bad after 1 week. Help!!!!

Answer 1

You should check to see what version HDMI cables you have 1.3 should be available soon but get 1.2. Yes it is possible due to there not being a good quality control on the cables being made until this latest version (1.3). Also try to run the cables straight to the tv and not the receiver. Receivers can sometimes cause communication problems and devices to lose there handshake with devices over hdmi.

Answer 2

Bad Hdmi Cable

Answer 3

It is very unlikely that the cables have gone bad. I have personally drilled a hole straight through one once and it still worked beautifully (obviously, I replaced it anyway). The more likely culprit is that the HDMI port on either the DVD player or one of the two you are using on the receiver has gone bad. Most likely it is on the DVD player due to the fact that the HDMI port on most DVD players are so flimsy and a slight tweak of the connected HDMI cable can damage the port. I've seen this one too many times.

Another possibility is that the HDMI assignments on the receiver somehow changed. This is highly unlikely though, but still possible. You would have to enter into the setup menu and reassign the DVD HDMI input and make sure that HDMI monitor out is enabled.

My guess though is that the DVD player needs to be swapped.

Answer 4

Hi there .Anything can happen to digital cables.Are your cables within the specified maximum length for HDMI ?HDMI cables do not use error correction,which means once information is lost ,it's lost for good.This will occur if the cables are too long.One of the problems with digital cables is they have to under go many different processes which are encoded in different ways,and these have to be converted back and forth between these processes until the signal is ready to appear as an image on the display.Consequently, conversions are always going on . in addition,"digital-to-digital" conversion is no more a guarantee of signal quality than "digital-to-analog"

The problem is we never know what exactly is going on inside consumer equipment and how the different signals are being processed,scaled,decoded,converted etc .This applies irrespective of whether we are dealing with pure analog,analog and digital,or with pure digital.

There is also the problem of equipment settings and system calibration.Improper settings would not help in producing the best results while different settings on different inputs will lead to different system response to the same signal when applied across different inputs.

Whenever a digital signal is passed through a cable,the leading and trailing edges of the transitions in voltage representing the digital data,are rounded off.This rounding increases drastically with distance up to a point where it may be hard for the Receiver to reconstruct the original bitstream.
As long as the level of errors is contained,HDMI cables would still perform in that the rounding of edges and reflections will not compromise the display ability to re-construct the image.However,these errors would often show as "pixel-dropouts",also referred to as "sparkles".Sparkles would normally start to appear within a few feet beyond the maximum length at which the HDMI cable is designed to operate correctly.

If we try to increase the length of a HDMI cable beyond the point at which "sparkles"first start to appear you would soon end up with no image at all.We have reached what is often referred to as the "digital cliff",because of the abruptness that this failure process takes place.So much information is lost that the display becomes unable to reconstruct enough information to even produce an image

This is why i never use any digital interconnect cables.Too many things can go wrong. As far as quality is concerned there is no possible way to predict in advance whether HDMI cables will perform better than an analog video connection.