Drop some knowledge.

So, we got a new TV. LCD flatscreen, high-def, digital state of the art. So, what that means is that I'm able to use HDMI cables instead of the ol' yellow-red-white RCA cables. HDMI takes digital signal from DVD players... computers... anything that sends out a digital signal. Now, anyone that's into stereos knows that the cables are where they "get you" as far as price gouging goes. The digital area is no different: Cheap Cable vs Expensive Cable. Now, back in the day, there was an audiable difference between cheap ol' speaker wire and expensive monster cables, because with an analog signal, shielding and quality of wire could make a difference. However, with digital cable, it's all digital signal. Ones and zeros.

There's just not much of a difference between an HDMI cable of one brand or another. That is, not so you’d notice. There may be differences in cable construction (insulation, cladding, the core, etc), but not in the bandwidth they carry. There’s a minimum, which the HDMI protocol specifies, and that’s it. Also, most HDMI cables (cheap and expensive) have gold contacts. Take a look. The quantity of gold doesn’t make a cable expensive, nor does the process involved in plating them. Gold in these quantities is very cheap. You’re certainly not getting $20 or $50 of gold in each cable. It’s a layer that's only a few molecules thick.

But you’d be very hard pressed to determine any kind of signal quality difference between a low-priced and a high-priced cable. First, unlike analog signalling, with digital signalling a cruddy cable doesn’t mean a poor picture. It means no picture, or horrible artifacts, or errors in the rendering, audio garbling, etc.