this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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It matters in digital signals more than I expected.
A bad-quqlity HDMI cable over a long run will start getting a bunch of noise on some of my displays that shows up as random green specs popping off due to signal loss, whereas better cables will give a clean signal.
And back when more broadcasts were analog and I ran tech for a road show, I'd occasionally pick up random stations on poorly-shielded cables that would get amplified by powered speakers. The cables essentially became antennas. Though I haven't run into that in over 20 years.
Poorly-shielded cables and speakers also used to have a lot of issues with cell phones. Anyone else remember the series of 3-beeps you could sometimes hear on speakers a few seconds before a phone in the room started ringing?
HDMI either works or it doesn't. It's not an analogue signal.
I think the green specks they mentioned ARE the parts where it didn't work. It was not like an analog issue that might tint the color of all the pixels, it was a digital issue where more than 99% of the pixels were the EXACT correct color and then a handful of spots had corrupted data which manifests as green specks on that monitor.
I don't know what the specifications say should happen when data loss happens, but I'd much rather my screen show a random spot rather than refuse to display anything that's corrupted.
That's not true. Packet loss is a thing. It's the same reason some USB cables suck and others are awesome.
Not true. Corruption happens in digital signals quite often. The effects are different of course: packet loss, garbled audio, the green dots the poster you replied to described. I have seen it all.
If it "worked or not" we wouldn't need things like checksums or error correction.
Source: did electrical engineering, then 25 years in networking.