[Ed Gillett @ Sep 26th 2007 4:51AM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does gold plating an HDMI connection make a blind bit of difference? It's digital. The 0's and 1's either get through, or they don't. Not like analogue where this may have been beneficial to improve quality of connection. Yet more bling to confuse consumers not in the know "oooh - gold shiny. Must be way better than silver shiny ... will pay more ..." :|

[CB @ Sep 26th 2007 7:11AM]

Well you would think that, but i'll give us all a short lesson in digital transmission over cables as I'm a telecom engineer.
As you send a '1' pulse down a cable it charges up , much the same as a capacitor and then slowly release this voltage as it changes to a '0', this all means your lovely square wave ends up as all notchy and droopy, there are many ways that the recieving and sending equipment cope with this, by inverting a string of '1's for instance or they'll charge up the cable too much.
Dirty contacts can make the problem worse by introducing another component effect, the error correcting circuitry copes with it all, but the more you make it work the more the equipment is guessing.
It's miniscule and the capacitor effect only really troubles lengthy Telco cables.