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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It means that the electricity you would have to pay if you did the computations yourself would be more expensive than paying them to do it. Part of thst has to do with the fact that China has cheap electricity, also due to their massive push into renewables. Part of that is just economies of scale. A big server farm can run more efficiently than your PC on average.
Normslly you'd expext that more (and cheaper) supply would drive down prices. Classic market logic.
How do do you explain that this market logic ceases to exist for renewables only? A whopping ~2TW or ~35% of generated power in China is renewable and since renewable energy is roughly 1.5 to 4 times cheaper than e.g. coal per kW/h produced that ought to have some impact.
If it has not I'd be curious in your explaination of the mechanism involved.
I wasn't surprised the least. But I am also a hardware guy. Going into production with such new technologies means first making aure it is even feasible for mass production and long term use. There are ways to speed up these tests, but if you need a battery to last 10+ years, you will only be able to speed it up by so much — especially if it is new experimental tech.
If it is, there are probably multiple intermediate small scale experiments and then the tooling and production line technology might still need to be developed as well. Someone in a lab making a theoretical discovery is not the same as something making sense commercially in the slightest.
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