This may come as suprise to many people but if you sit too far away from a 1080P screen showing a Blu Ray film your investment in the 1080P extra resolution is wasted. How can this be?

Even a person with perfect eyesite can only detect a certain amount of detail in an image. The further away you are the less detail your eye can detect.

If you sit too far away from the screen your eye can only detect the level of detail that 720P resolution provides. So even if you replaced your 1080P with a 720P screen of the same size you would not notice the difference.

To put this another way lets assume that your sofa that you like to watch films on is 9 feet from the wall where your flat screen is mounted. If you buy a 46″ screen your vision can only detect the resolution that a 720P screen is capable of at this distance. If you buy a 46″ 1080P screen instead you pay more money but will not be able to notice the difference. To get the full benefit of a 1080P screen you would need to buy a 70″ screen…….which is going to be rather expensive. You will save an awful lot of money by moving the sofa nearer to the screen. But how close does it need to go if you buy the 46″ 1080P screen? Well the answer is to get the full benefit of that high resolution screen the sofa has to move 3ft so that your viewing distance is reduced to 6ft.

The optimum viewing distances for popular screen sizes are:

Screen Size	1080P Distance	720P Distance
32″	50″	75″
37″	58″	87″
40″	63″	94″
42″	66″	99″
46″	66″	99″
50″	78″	118″
60″	94″	141″

You can see a more detailed chart here.

But the crux of of of this is that if you want to experience the full Blu Ray effect it is cheaper to move your sofa closer to the wall than to buy a screen big enough to get the full HD experience.

The What Hi-Fi annual awards are due to be published in the What Hi-Fi Awards issue that appears on October 20th. It is interesting how the cable awards have changed over recent years. A few years ago there were a whole range of important awards from SCART cable and Component Video cable through to Analogue, Optical and Digital interconnects. There were enough to go round and it was possible for most manufacturers to pick up a significant award for something or other.

But now in 2009 there are really only two awards that are highly significant: speaker cable and HDMI cable. The reason being that these are the two cables that are responsible for the majority of spend in the cable sector.

So in October there will be at most two brands who will be delighted with their results and the remaining brands will have to look on with envy.

The cable awards are of real value to a brand. When hardware such as a Blu-Ray player or LCD screen wins an award it if often a short term benefit as hardware products have short lives and are often obselete within a couple of months.

There is much more stability in the cable market though, so an award will usually have a life right through the following year up to the next awards.

Our team have already made their bets on who will win the HDMI cable and Speaker Cable awards. It will be interesting to see if any of us have got it right.

QED have been busy on speaker cables recently. Having bought out the new premium Revelation Speaker cable that really impressed us, they have followed up soon afterwards with an enhanced mid-range speaker cable. They haven’t actually replaced Silver Anniversary XT, instead they have a positioned XT Evolution as a slightly more expensive enhancement.

The construction of XT Evolution is if anything more like Revelation than standard XT. You could describe it as Revelation without insulation to the strandedl conductors. We can only assume that the construction cost of Evolution XT is nearer to Revelation (with an RRP of £15.00) that standard XT (with an RRP of £6.00). So given the RRP is £6.50 we reckon QED are offering it as something of a bargain.

Our listening test on our high end system confirmed what we suspected from the construction of the cable and our high regard for Revelation. The system was previously using Chord Signature speaker cables. So when we replaced them with XT Evolution you would normally expect the system to sound like the someone had turned the lights off. But whilst the XT Evolution is not in the same class as Chord Signature the system retained the authority and accuracy that you expect from a high end system. We were particularly impressed with the timing and pace. Quite remarkable given the RRP is only £6.50 per metre.

You should think of this cable as a fantastic slightly de-speced Revelation that sells at a bargain price.

In terms of audio performance Evolution XT easily justifies the minimal price premium over XT. So unless your budget is really tight we would strongly recommend an potential XT buyer goes for XT Evolution.

To buy this cable click QED XT Evolution Speaker Cable

We recently wrote about Chord bringing out a more affordable HDMI cable, the new Chord HDMI supershield. Well they have now followed quickly with a new premium HDMI cable that replaces the Silver Plus and takes them even more upmarket with a higher price.

The new Chord Active Silver Plus has an RRP of £155.00 wheras the previous Silver Plus was £85.00. This takes the new cable into definite premium territory for the home cinema enthusiast who has high standards and is willing to pay a significant price to achieve them.

As you can see from the picture the Active has a filter built into all lengths of the cable which is designed to improve the subjective quality of audio signals transmitted by the cable. Early feedback from customers confirms this to be true. It will be interesting to see an in depth review in one of the magazines.

Click here to see the new Chord cable: Chord HDMI Silver Active Plus

We have decided to focus more on headphones and sell them from a dedicated new website Headphone-Shop .

The new site carries a wide range of headphone brands and offers the same excellent service that you have been used to with Hificables.co.uk .

There have always been debates about the differences that cables make and whether more expensive cables offer significant tangible benefits. In the days of analogue audio cables we have always reverted to the “trust your ears” approach. In our experience good analogue cables justify their existance by what they deliver and this is something that cannot be measured by analytical equipment.

If anything the debate over high price HDMI cables is even stronger. But it is interesting that with HDMI cables the differences are quantifiable and measurable.

The biggest problem with an HDMI cable is that when it’s bandwidth limitations are exceeded it simply stops working. This is because the receiving equipment is no longer able to accurately detect the 1’s and 0’s in the digital signal and gives up. Equipment does have error detection circuity that can detect bad data and to some extent recover the lost data but this is only effective up to a point.

Any given HDMI cable will have a maximum bandwidth or data rate that it can successfully work at. Exceed this and the cable fails to communicate. The longer the cable the lower this bandwidth is. So a 1.0M HDMI cable may be quite happy sending a 1080P video signal but a 10.0M HDMI cable of the same construction may not.

When HDMI cables are tested to see whether they work the results are presented as an “eye pattern”.

Here is an example of an eye pattern for a Wireworld Chroma 9.0M cable.

The purple pattern shows the signal being transmitted by the cable. The red lozenge outline shows an area that this signal needs to stay out of if the digital 1’s and 0’s are to be transmited successfully. If the purple pattern crosses the red line the cable fails. Equally the further the purple pattern stays away from the red line the greater the margin of success. A cable usually fails due to the red being crossed on the left side or the lozenge rather than the right side. This cable passes but only just. But to be fair to Wireworld it is the second least expensive HDMI cable in the range and in addition Wireworld only claim that the Chroma will handle 1080P up to 9.0M. But what we would like to see is tangible evidence that a more expensive Wireworld HDMI cable can do better. So lets look at the Wireworld Ultraviolet HDMI.

Here is a longer (and higher priced) 13.0M Wireworld Ultraviolet tested at the same bandwidth. Two things are imediately apparent. Firstly the purple pattern is much thinner showing reduced variation in the way the signal is transmitted. But most importantly the gap between the purple pattern and red lozenge has increased considerably. So this cable could be made up to longer than 13.0M and still be expected to pass. Actually Wireworld are very cautious and only guarantee the cable will do 1080P up to 12.0M.

So the superior performance of the Ultraviolet over the Chroma can quite clearly be measured. What about the relative cost? Well a 9.0M Wireworld Chroma is £140.00 and a 9.0M Wireworld Ultraviolet is £270.00.

One other issue that should be born in mind is that over time the bandwidth that you send over your HDMI cables may increase. So for example, you may
upgarde your screen from 720P to 1080P. But equally you may only be sending video over the HDMI but then start sending both the video and audio via an AV amplifier. So you may have an HDMI cable that works (but only just) and after the change the increased bandwidth exceeds its capabilities and it fails. The message here is that it is a good idea to get a better HDMI cable than you need today to build in some contigency for future upgrades.

We are grateful to Wireworld for publishing this data. It is quite rare for manufacturers to give access to their eye patterns.

Back in November 2008 QED replaced the well respected HDMI-P cable with the New Performance HDMI cable. The new cable immediately went on to win 5 stars in What Hi-Fi. But the price has crept up driven by exchange rates and commodity prices so the RRP for a 1.0M is now £59.00.

So the re-issue of the original HDMI-P at an RRP of £39.99 will be welcome news for enthusiasts looking to put together a quality system on a limited budget.

The original HDMI-P is no slacker since it still offers 1080P resolution and comforms to HDMI 1.3b.

To make things even better we have slimmed the price down even further and are selling a 1.0M for only £29.99 which is a great price for a cable of this specification.

The re-issue has been named the QED Classic HDMI-P and we have stock arriving on 8th June. Anyone wanting one is advised to buy one now and we will ship the day they arrive with us.

You can place an order HERE

It has become very common now for loudspeakers to provide 4 terminals so that it is possible to use bi-wire speaker cables.

For those that don’t know this means running two sets of speakers cables to the speaker, one then connects to the treble (high frequency) driver and other connects to the bass (low frequency driver).

Since most amplifiers do not have a seperate low and high frequency set of outputs the cables are joined together at the amplifier end so that the cable is actually sending the whole frequency spectrum from low right through to high.

As you are using twice as much speaker cable when you bi-wire, your speaker cables cost twice as much. But is this money well spent?

You will often hear peoole say that bi-wire cables ound better than ordinary stereo cables……and they do. But often by only a modest amount. It is our opinion that the same amount of money spent on a higher quality pair of stereo cables will provide a more noticable improvement.

So our advice is that given a budget for speaker cables you get most “bangs for your buck” by spending it on higher quality stereo cables than on twice as much inferior bi-wire cable.

On caveat though. You can only use stereo wire if you have retained the blanking plates that join the treble and bass terminals together. If you have lost them you can buy short jumper cables to achieve the same result. By using quality cable for the jumper cables the you will get better results than the simple blanking plates.

Whilst we are cautious about bi-wiring there is something else called bi-amping that we would endorse. This is where you have two amplifiers, one handling the bass signal and the other the treble signal. In this case you still run two speaker cables to each loudspeaker but now one carries just the bass signal and the other just carries the treble signal. Bi-amping is very effective if you have the equipment that can support it.

We thought it would be useful to make a video showing speakers terminals with the bung fitted and how to remove them:

Chord have excelled in the premium HDMI cable market with their HDMI 1.3 Silver Plus starting at around £80.00 for a 1m cable. This is great for high end home cinema users with a sizable budget to play with but the volume market for HDMI cables is in cables around £50.00.

Chord had the Lo-Pro but it never really sold very well. Maybe having Lo in the name didn’t help.

The new HDMI 1.3b Supershield seems to ticks all the right boxes. For a start anything with Super in the name must start with a considearble advantage over anything with Lo in the name! The cable offers 1080P resolution and 1.3b compatibility and the RRP for the 1.0M is magically below the £50 figure at £49.00.

Whether the new HDMI cable hits the big time will depend upon how it fares in the What Hi-Fi review that must be scheduled in the next few months. But for anyone looking for a solid , well performing HDMI cable from a trusted brand, the new 1.3b Supershield looks a good bet.

To buy the cable  click - Chord HDMI 1.3b Supershield