I recently purchased Audioquest Mocha HDMI, upgraded a vodka. Same cable but with the DBS pack. What a difference that made in the picture. The coffee (Mocha)had a sharper, more detailed, and richer color than the vodka. I noticed the same difference when I chaged to the vodka from the carbon and carbon from cinnamon . Each step up was a clearer and more defined picture, better color, and greater contrast. All the comparisons were made on a paused frame from a Dolby vision blu Ray player to a Dolby vision OLED 4K tv, with a native 4K Dolby vision movie. The differences between the cables were faint, but obvious. Except when I went from cinnamon directly to Mocha, that was very obvious. But going incrementally as the line up goes small improvements with each step of better cable. I simply changed the cable out and put the other one because I was curious if in fact HDMI cable matters or is just snake oil. Now I don’t know if I can say spending 500 dollars on an HDMI cable and it will be worth the difference, that’s for your eyes to determine, and if the difference is worth the extra cash again use your judgment. I had all the cables already so I wasn’t buying any just to see if there is a difference. A cheaper upgrade and well worth the money in my option is the Audioquest mocha, it’s limited time through select online distributors only and Only available in 1M . It’s exactly the same as a coffee 500 dollar cable but relabled as a mocha and only 200 dollars, I wish they offered more options for length. If I didn’t have a ton of money wrapped up in HDMI already I most likely would purchase enough to put one on every component.
The same theory holds true for speaker wire, interconnects, and sub cables. I use Audioquest water for interconnects , and rocket88 speaker wires.i have also explored different interconnects and speaker wires and heard a very noticeable difference. A friend loaned me a pair of castle rock speaker wire and it was a HUGE improvement. The same goes for interconnect, the same guy brought over a pair of red river XLR and a pair of FIRE XLR, the water have a very noticeable presence over the red river and the fire were dramaticly better than the water, but way out of my budget.
I personally have not heard any difference by changing a power cable, however I will admit a firehose for a power cable sure looks cool!
In conclusion as much as people like to bash HDMI cables, speaker cables and interconnects online and other forums calling them snake oil , the fact remains, they do matter. Get the best you can with the budget that’s available to you. A better cable, better materials, better insulation will in fact give a better result.
I hope this post helps helps some people, I do not have much experience with other company’s other than Audioquest, partially because a friend is a dealer and I get nice discounts plus I get to help a friend make some money at the same time.
