I guess it's more down to consistent and suitable build quality, along with shielding, rather than bullshit coatings and oxygen free bollocks.

There still is a market for people who have insane beliefs about the benefits of graphite coatings on oxygen-free copper inside medical grade silicone insulation. In the audio world, it reached its peak in the late 90s with a gent called Russ Andrews who marketed paper dots that you could peel off and stick to things like fridges, water tanks, televisions, etc. These had been 'treated' with his proprietary purified water and would make your hifi sound better. He's still in business banging out his special plug fuses and so on.

If the coupler (that's so much easier to type than female to female) is rubbish though, why would it work in a different office. The coupler seems the weak link at the office with the floorbox, plugging straight into the TV there from the laptop works ok.

The coupler works fine at our main office though. It only fouls up in the other office, which points the finger either at the environment there, or a combination of things in that setup that I don't yet understand.  :-/

If I get time this afternoon, I'll set something up in the server room and have the coupler very close to the back of the server cab.

Could be a larger amount of interference in the other office. I haven't read back but is the connection box next to or does it contain a load of other electrical junctions that might lose their shielding in that area?

Wrap it all in lead.

or,  

I like the wrap it all in lead option. It might stop people tinkering with it.

I tried the coupler in a small scale setup with a tft monitor in our server room, and have literally had it on top of the four 3 phase commando connectors in there and inamongst a lot of other power leads and everything was fine.

I'll cancel the lead order. :C

I had a look at his site earlier on and the Kimber brand they sell rings a bell as a high priced and even higher bollocks name from when I first started looking into hifi stuff.

There's this on there. Crazy stuff. There's even an option for getting your cable frozen. I suspect the chill might not last once I've got it installed and cranked the heating up.

Wow! That's just ridiculous. I'm almost tempted by the £1,195 1m USB cable. It comes with its own carry case :O And definitely the cryo treatment. Although no option for burn in with the USB cables :(

Ok, er, they're suggesting adding an earth rod with their RF Router to dump additional ground noise from the system. To me that would be worse cos the system would have two different ground references.

Hah, just had a look at that. I love the idea that it comes with a carry case. I appreciate cables are portable, but once it's in your hifi, does it need to be? Handmade? For that price I'd want some machine precision engineering, not some dude with a soldering iron putting my cable together.

Possible ground loop right there. Stupid idea!

Well, I think I got to the bottom of it. The cable coming from the TV into the floorbox is missing a pin at the floorbox end. It's marked up as Channel 0+ (pin 7) on this diagram:

https://s.hswstatic.com/gif/hdmi-connector-diagram.gif

I guess plugging a device straight into it gets around whatever the problem is (grounding maybe), but using the extensions just exacerbates it.

 

"missing a pin"

Never had it or broke off?

That I'm not sure about. It could be a result of some rough handling, or maybe a manufacturing defect. Either way, it's needing replacing. Pic attached of the offending lead with a working one for comparison.

Edit - a prize for the person who guesses what body part they're squeezed between. :|

If it had been working before, I'm guessing it broke.

Klingon forehead furrows.

They should have gone for the oxygen-free titanium pins. Wouldn't have broken.

Guaranteed for life!


*(shipping and handling not included)

Is that for the life of the cable or my life?

the life of the company, usually.

And Happy Birthday for the other day, Matt!