This headline (by the author or editor) is completely misrepresenting the article.
HDMI cables are different. Badly made ones, and ones rated differently, can fail in unpredictable ways. The article describes failure modes, and alludes to but brushes over technical differences.
Coincidentally, I personally spent 16+ hours on the better part of this past Thursday and Friday nights trying to get a Cablevision set top box (OptimumTV) to cooperate with an Onkyo receiver over HDMI.
I'd been using the receiver with a variety of equipment, and with a long run to a wall mounted TV, for several years. I swapped in a new TV, and added the set top box, and suddenly all HDMI related functions of the receiver started failing randomly, 90% of the time.
I eventually attributed this to HDMI negotiation between receiver and Cablevision's box. With STB plugged in, Boxee and DVD player would fail too. Without STB, the others would work.
With eight cables I had on hand, all "known good", the receiver HDMI indicator would either fail to light, with no picture and no sound on the TV, or blink rapidly, and the picture and sound would come and go rapidly. (To me, this suggests a flawed implementation of HDCP by the Optimium box, likely failing the receiver handshake as it acts as a repeater between STB and the TV, and this Onkyo has a hardware upscaler. An HDCP cable failure is alluded to in the CNET article, but all eight types I had on hand failed in the same way.)
Cable brands that failed: Monoprice, Amazon Essentials, Radio Shack, Firedog (Best Buy), and Monster. Also, these were all cables purchased before 2010.
I was not in the mood to buy a new receiver just to work with Cablevision's box, so I decided to try the Home Depot "installer" aisle, and selected "GE Ultra Pro HDMI with Ethernet" in a two pack of 6' lengths, and a 15' foot "in wall" installer kit as well.
These are labeled as supporting audio return channel, 3D, and Ethernet, and are rated for 4K video (not mentioned in the linked article). The Cablevision OptimumTV set top box does not use any of these features.
When I used this new HDMI cable, the whole system worked flawlessly. Dumbfounded, I repeatedly swapped in my other cables, but they all failed, while these worked. I had both a 15' and two 6' ones from this brand, and all three worked.
So no, not all HDMI cables are the same. I cannot attribute this particular behavior to "bad cables" or even "cheap cables", it has to be some feature of the cable design.
// Disclaimer: I dislike cable TV for its "bundling" practices, and hope Google wins their custom Hulu bid to force the studios to keep content online for non cable subscribers longer. I was doing this install for someone else.
Without seeing your installation one can only guess at a possible explanation, but it may be conceivable that a ground loop in the system was causing interference with all devices at a level higher than the common-mode rejection capability of the HDMI receivers. This might explain why your other devices would stop working when you plugged in the cable box. Maybe the GE cable was lacking a ground connection that was present in the other cables?
Yes. The previous 8 cables were high speed HDMI 1.3, and the new ones HDMI 1.4. Wikipedia says "High Speed HDMI 1.3 cables can support all HDMI 1.4 features except for the HDMI Ethernet Channel". To my knowledge, the receiver doesn't support that particular feature and neither does the Optimum STB.
In any cases, whatever caused this issue, I agree with the body of the article that not all HDMI cables are the same. The headline does a disservice.
HDMI cables are different. Badly made ones, and ones rated differently, can fail in unpredictable ways. The article describes failure modes, and alludes to but brushes over technical differences.
Coincidentally, I personally spent 16+ hours on the better part of this past Thursday and Friday nights trying to get a Cablevision set top box (OptimumTV) to cooperate with an Onkyo receiver over HDMI.
I'd been using the receiver with a variety of equipment, and with a long run to a wall mounted TV, for several years. I swapped in a new TV, and added the set top box, and suddenly all HDMI related functions of the receiver started failing randomly, 90% of the time.
I eventually attributed this to HDMI negotiation between receiver and Cablevision's box. With STB plugged in, Boxee and DVD player would fail too. Without STB, the others would work.
With eight cables I had on hand, all "known good", the receiver HDMI indicator would either fail to light, with no picture and no sound on the TV, or blink rapidly, and the picture and sound would come and go rapidly. (To me, this suggests a flawed implementation of HDCP by the Optimium box, likely failing the receiver handshake as it acts as a repeater between STB and the TV, and this Onkyo has a hardware upscaler. An HDCP cable failure is alluded to in the CNET article, but all eight types I had on hand failed in the same way.)
Cable brands that failed: Monoprice, Amazon Essentials, Radio Shack, Firedog (Best Buy), and Monster. Also, these were all cables purchased before 2010.
I was not in the mood to buy a new receiver just to work with Cablevision's box, so I decided to try the Home Depot "installer" aisle, and selected "GE Ultra Pro HDMI with Ethernet" in a two pack of 6' lengths, and a 15' foot "in wall" installer kit as well.
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202742223/h_d2/Produ...
These are labeled as supporting audio return channel, 3D, and Ethernet, and are rated for 4K video (not mentioned in the linked article). The Cablevision OptimumTV set top box does not use any of these features.
When I used this new HDMI cable, the whole system worked flawlessly. Dumbfounded, I repeatedly swapped in my other cables, but they all failed, while these worked. I had both a 15' and two 6' ones from this brand, and all three worked.
So no, not all HDMI cables are the same. I cannot attribute this particular behavior to "bad cables" or even "cheap cables", it has to be some feature of the cable design.
// Disclaimer: I dislike cable TV for its "bundling" practices, and hope Google wins their custom Hulu bid to force the studios to keep content online for non cable subscribers longer. I was doing this install for someone else.