{"id":3186,"date":"2011-05-30T11:48:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T01:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=3186"},"modified":"2011-05-30T11:48:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T01:48:17","slug":"kogan-provides-hammer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=3186","title":{"rendered":"Kogan provides hammer"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I was wandering around Myers here in Canberra, keeping a handle on what is presently on the market, and marvelling at the low sale prices of various products, compared to their RRPs\/SRPs. And, of course, my eye fell upon the cables.<\/p>\n

Likewise, a few days before while waiting to pick up some photos being printed at Harvey Norman, I inspected the cables — specifically HDMI ones — available.<\/p>\n

It was horrible. At both places the cheapest HDMI cable you can buy, typically for 1.5 metres, was about $45. Say, about a quarter of the price of a budget Blu-ray player.<\/p>\n

Now I don’t have any problem with high priced connection cables. Perhaps there is some amazing subtlety in conveying sound and picture that can be better delivered with one cable than another, although I don’t believe it. Equally, I do believe that even though I think they’re likely wrong in fact, people should be entirely free to spend up big on cables if they think or hope they may improve their system’s performance.<\/p>\n

So what irritates me isn’t that there are expensive HDMI cables carried by these stores, but that there are no inexpensive ones.<\/p>\n

So I emailed the PR for Kogan<\/a>. What I wanted, I said, was a hammer. A hammer I could use on silly HDMI cable prices. I would like, I explained, to say that there’s no reason to spend these prices, unless you have contrary beliefs regarding cable quality. Instead you can buy a perfectly serviceable 3 metre HDMI cable for just $8. That’s what Kogan sells<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kogan says of them: ‘HDMI High Speed Cable – Supports Ethernet and 3D!’<\/p>\n

But I could not use these low cost cables to hammer high-priced cables unless I was satisfied that they would do the job. So I asked if Kogan could send me a couple to test out. It sent me three.<\/p>\n

They came neatly enough coiled in their plastic bags, and were a thicker gauge than I was expecting. Indeed, thicker than the first HDMI cable I purchased, which cost about $50 for a metre cable back in I think 2004 (I was desperate, and it was the only one I could find in Canberra). Here’s the Kogan:<\/p>\n

\"Kogan<\/a><\/p>\n

Closer inspection revealed a basic, functional cables with gold-plated plugs and without obvious physical flaws. Like a Model T Ford, they come in any colour that you want so long as it’s black. If you want pretty cables behind your gear, look elsewhere:<\/p>\n

\"Kogan<\/a><\/p>\n

Now to the important stuff: do they work?<\/p>\n

I used two of them over the weekend, one from the home theatre receiver to the new 55 inch Samsung TV I’m reviewing, and one from a Blu-ray 3D player to the same TV. Performance — including with Blu-ray 3D content — indistinguishable from my regular Kordz cables. Right now I have one of them connecting my Blu-ray player and home theatre receiver. I have set the Blu-ray to output the video at 1080p60 and use the higher data component video 4:4:4 output. I have also set it to convert the multichannel audio to PCM format. With the 96kHz, 24 bit, 7.1 channel signal on the test content I am playing, the audio alone adds up to more than 18Mbps.<\/p>\n

Performance? Fine. Not a problem at all.<\/p>\n

No idea if it supports Ethernet since I don’t know of any implementations of this yet. But for everyday use, these cables are fine.<\/p>\n

And only cost $8 each.<\/p>\n

So why don’t the retailers carry reasonably priced HDMI cables? Kogan shows it can be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I was wandering around Myers here in Canberra, keeping a handle on what is presently on the market, and marvelling at the low sale prices of various products, compared to their RRPs\/SRPs. And, of course, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,41],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3186"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3190,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3186\/revisions\/3190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}