Yep, HDMI sucks, it IS way better than it was the first year or two it was out, but still is ridiculous! I find it completely inane that we have version 1.4 when none of the perks of 1.3a (anyone own a Blu-ray with Deep Color yet? NO! I know you don't!) have come to fruition.

The AV preamp/receiver is the most technological piece in any home theater, and one of the most expensive pieces. The countless changes in the way AV data it transferred over the last 7-8 years has made them the most overpriced doorsteps long before they should have been.

The HDMI cable itself is flawed as well, but that is another issue. Go to any big box store and watch the guy buying a $800 TV, $300 receiver, $200 Blu-ray and adding the only HDMI cables they have for $80 a pop..........

Thanks, what a fantastic article. And I thought trying to keep up with issues in streaming video was complex.

"Gary Shapiro and studio heads need to pressure Silicon Image to get it right". A noble thought, just like all the major PC and laptop manufacturers that should've pressured Microsoft to get Vista right before pummelling the market with it. How much is upgrading / cross-grading to Windows 7 going to cost? The issues also sound similar to the other current "must have" being WPA2 wireless encryption. Try getting that to maintain a vice-like handshake with multiple devices on a network. WPA seems to do the job just fine. Just another excuse to get suckers (like me...) to upgrade without REALLY understanding what is involved.

Unfortunately as Gen Y'ers start to take serious control of bigger budget purchases, they will import their disposability mentality which seems to be an underlining issues with lack of upgradeability of hardware. So what if I need to toss out the $3,000 each TV, amp, pre amp etc. I'm sure (eventually...) there'll be banks to lend crazy credit to crazy purchasers with no capacity to repay. How many topics can I cover here?

I love reading about the new gear, having nothing with HDMI and now seem to have yet another reason not to invest in the system of my dreams. Heck, this could've been written by my wife.

I guess I'll stick with my 20 year old pair of Kef Karas (rebuilt only once thanks) and the Harmon Kardon 2 channel amp; a mere babe at 15 years. At the right volume and speaker angle I still manage to annoy the neighbours and get reasonable surround phase.

And one other thing. When do you think that the iPod toting so-called geeks will ever figure out blasting 128kb compressed music doesn't sound better through a $10k amp and $20k speakers?

Call me cynical, but...

"There are just so many issues facing HDMI that the format seems plagued, yet Silicon Image keeps coming out with new versions. Version 1.1 and 1.2 offered small changes that didn't freak the consumers out too badly, but version 1.3 was needed to pass HD audio from Blu-ray to an AV preamp or receiver which means that clients need to take a total bath on earlier HDMI-based electronics to get HD audio via HDMI. The good news? Silicon Image is coming out with HDMI version 1.4 which offers yet another reason to devalue your AV preamp by 40 to 50 percent so that you can have features you don't need while getting the same, unreliable connection that we've been suffering with since HDMI 1.1."

I would like to recommend you for an e-Pulitzer for this paragraph alone, Jerry. Does the Nobel group have any form of "electronic" peace prize yet?!

Kudos for putting this frustration into common language. I've been telling my long-term custom clients for years to avoid this, simply because I don't want the service calls in the middle of some Friday night party or Sunday afternoon football extravaganza.

Is it time for the revolution against those mythical Hollywood attorneys? Surely you know a few from your old days at Cello. I ended up with one of your old clients, Perry Hirsch, for a while, keeping his Ampro singing, but he only does Trusts and Wills! (so he's one of the 'good' ones?!)

Cheers!

Great article & agree completely.

The unsubtle irony of the situation is that pirated content, easily and readily available to anyone, can be played trouble free through any of a host of devices as it's had the copy protection stripped out.

In other words, as a result of the catastrophe that HDMI and copy protection are (at least in their current state), stolen material works BETTER and in a more trouble free manner than approved, purchased content.

Any rational observer would conclude that they're actively incenting end users to steal content.

-Rob

I agree that basic debugging is needed before doing 'enhancements' to a flawed product. Yet I seem to be one of the lucky few who has an A/V system, completely driven by HDMI with minimal problems. My sources are a Motorola cable box with DVR using FIOS, Toshiba HD-A3 HD DVD player, and a WDTV media player. All 3 connect to my Onkyo 606 receiver via 1 meter HDMI cables. I am holding of on Blu ray until the bugs are worked out & prices drop some more. I keep reading about horror stories of players needing firmware upgrades, or not being able to read several discs.Then the receiver connects to my Pioneer Kuro Plasma via 2 meter HDMI. All works well with one minor annoyance: any time I change sources there is about a 5 second delay for the HDMI signal to synch up & start playing the new source. Also, if I turn off the Pioneer monitor, the same 5 second delay occurs before sound returns to my speakers.

As one of those ipod toating, gen-y geeks, I'd like your address, please? If you're running WPA, that protocol has been found to have a number of vulnerabilities, and I can pop your security in about 15 minutes. Then I can lift some credit card numbers and bank account info and buy me some of that 1.4 HDMI gear without caring how much it costs.

So while I'm kidding about your address, I'm not kidding about the rest. WPA is flawed. WPA2 has been cracked as well, but it's a bit tougher, and takes longer to get past. That's why I only use wireless for home theater stuff, and run a cable for all my systems that need a level of security. Say, the one I use to login to my bank account with. And that's why, if you're using WPA on a system capable of WPA2, it would do you well to rethink the cost/benefit ratio of not using WPA2.

And my ipod? It has 320kbps audio only, thank you, all lovingly ripped from my CD and vinyl collections. I don't get the love for 128kbps either, but that was chosen as an optimal file size and gained popularity back in the days when a 4 gig player was considered to have a huge amount of storage. I'm fairly sure that it also has a lot to do with the fact that early MP3 adopters were, for the most part, listening over cheap computer speakers, since I've had an mp3 player since sometime in the early 90s on my PC (OS/2 then linux, thank you very much).

As to the article itself, I agree that it would be best to skip 1.4 and wait on the mythical "2.0", but that's unlikely. Technology just doesn't work that way. And it especially doesn't work that way when the MPAA and RIAA rear their ugly heads. If you want HDMI changed, you're going to have to go to the source. Once those two learn that the majority of their customers are not thieves, only then will we see systems that function smoothly. And that's not even getting into the fact that the first to market usually wins. But I'm really cynical when it comes to all this.

The constant HDMI upgrades / updates is one of the many reasons why I bought the NAD T765. You can upgrade the boards instead of repacing the entireTuner Ampplifier.

Quote from NAD web site :

http://nadelectronics.com/products/av-receivers/T765-A/V-Surround-Sound-Receiver

A Modular Design Construction places all input circuitry on five easily removable plug-in cards. This superior construction technique protects your investment via the capability for easy upgrades, fast and easy service and improved sound and video performance due to the neat internal layout. For example, if and when the Dolby True HD and/or DTS Master lossless multi-channel formats become fully useful standards of high-definition discs or other recordings, NAD will make upgraded processing available. With modular construction (and since HDMI 1.3 pipelines are already in place), this can be practical and affordable.

Problem solved !!!

NAD Man

There is one major flaw in the logic of 'Hollywood' regarding component video and copy protection. Component video is, to the best of my knowledge, 100% copy protected. How can I say this? Can anyone show me a consumer electronics component that has component video INPUTS and records content, from that input? I am not aware of any - and that is copy protection at it's finest. If the CE industry has gone this long without making a DVD recorder with no component input, and they can agree to subject us to HDMI, why can't they agree to continue to do what they've been doing for a decade or more already? Mass priacy averted. Samll scale piracy takes place on computers, not CE devices. HDMI won't shut down piracy in the computer realm. And next we have Microsoft / Intel / IBM etc trying to downgrade quality out of component video (which their products don't use) to protect content, when their own products offer the easiest path for a software pirate to do what they do - makes sense to me.

What to do? What to do? This piece couldn't be more timely for us--today we decided to accept that our nine-month-old Onkyo 606 has slowly developed this HDMI problem, which gets worse with every passing day. I'm bookmarking your great site, because no one else has exposed this absurd problem that I know of--but yours was just my first Google response, and though I could hardly expect much more information elsewhere, I will continue to research this mess. I believe every word, it's happened to us. Thanks! How about a remedy?

There's no doubt I will be thinking about this article every single time I have to reboot my television. HDMI could have been one of the best advances in A/V history, but it's mostly wasted potential at this point. What a disaster!

Tweaking HDMI will not fix its fatal flaw, which is its parallel communication method. Consumers need a serial communication method to have the ease of use and performance they expect. Nothing serial will be backwards compatible. Trying to make HDMI backwards-compatible with DVI created this entire mess. There are obviously issues other than the parallel communication one, but addressing those other issues without killing the parallel nature will mean very little and not enough.

I won't bother to try to convince Silicon Image or anyone else to fix HDMI. I merely point out that Light Peak will address these and other consumer issues and needs, so if HDMI isn't "fixed" within a year, Light Peak will kill it. I think consumers will be much happier with Light Peak, if it delivers what has been promised by Apple and Intel. I've never worked or owned stock in either company, but I was an ASIC designer years ago, so I think that makes me somewhat objective and informed on this topic. I can't wait for the day when I can distribute lossess digital video and audio throughout my home in an easy and inexpensive manner.