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What's the Matter with HDMI?
mrnomas writes with a link to the Audioholics site, which wonders why the HDMI standard is such a mess? The article's author suggests that the format was designed for the benefit of the content-producers and not the consumer. The result is a signal that's hard to route and switch, as well and unnecessarily complicated cable assemblies. They reach back to the DVI standard to see what might be done to make HDMI a little more consumer-friendly, with numerous technical elements woven through the discussion. "DVI lacked a couple of things which the consumer audio/video industry wanted. It was implemented on a variety of HD displays and source devices, but it was confusing for the consumer because of the many variants on the standard and different connector configurations, and it didn't carry audio signals. A consortium to develop and promote a new interface, HDMI, was formed; the idea was to come up with a standard which could be implemented more uniformly, was less confusing, and offered the option of routing audio signals along with video."
The HDCP copy protection crap is what causes HDMI devices to have trouble communicating with each other, especially if there is anything between the source and display devices, like an A/V receiver or HDMI switch box.
They are too stupid to realize that pirates aren't going to copy shows and movies by capturing uncompressed frames coming through the cables; they're going to make copies of the discs. But they insist on making the honest customers suffer through the slow cryptographic handshake that occurs any time you switch on an HDMI device or even switch sources on a TV.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
A screen that does video processing often has some delay. Feeding the audio through the screen (even when you want to send it to a separate amplifier) has the advantage that the audio can be delayed by the same amount, so it is kept lip-sync.
When you feed audio to an amplifier and video to a digital TV separately, you will often find that the audio is visibly ahead of the video.
As a physicist, it drives me nuts how much people are willing to pay for Monster cables or other "high-end" stuff. Need speaker wire? Just buy some heavy-gauge electrical wire. Home Depot sells 500 feet (152 m) of stranded 2-conductor 10-gauge (2.588 mm dia.) wire for about $85 USD. A similar length of thinner 12-gauge (2.053 mm dia.) Monster wire would cost a small fortune.
Some of you may note that, at 20 kHz (high end of human hearing range), the skin depth of copper is only about 0.47 mm, and so for high frequency, your conductivity will only scale with wire circumference, not area. That's true for solid-core, but keep in mind the Home Depot cable I mention is stranded, and has a 25% larger circumference than the Monster stuff. That should be more than enough to make up for any slight resistivity advantage the Monster cable might have from using purer copper (assuming they do).
What's really funny is the people who assume all this stuff matters for digital signals (as I saw in a few of the "reviews" on the Monster website). Unless you're stringing really long cables or your no-name stuff is really, really bad, there won't be a difference. Bits are bits, and small amounts of analog noise will be ignored.
You can buy a 3ft HDMI cable for something like $4, 6ft for $6. Yes you can buy some ludicrously expensive HDMI cables but you can blame consumer ignorance and retailer greed for that. There is no reason to spend that much seeing as it is digital.
I see no reason at all to use component in an everyday situation if your device (be it a 360, PS3, DVD player etc.) and TV both support HDMI. It would be as dumb as connecting your PC to your monitor with VGA even when both have DVI-D support. The picture quality is far better over HDMI / DVD-D because it's digital. Analogue by definitiion degrades so even the best composite signal will still be worse than HDMI.