ugh -- I know I should know better than to get involved.
HDMI is... not a very good cable spec in itself. Yes, it has all sorts of stuff in it to make it work (the error detections/correction, et cetera,) but realistically, it shouldn't need it. HDMI, unfortunately, was a Consumer Electronics Opportunistic Grab -- how to grab more money out of the consumer's pockets! First off, it's electrically identical to DVI-D. Why get a new connector that falls out of the port? Well, because they felt like it. Second, the cable-spec allows for only a finite amount of bandwidth, and the existing HDMI signal chain is really close to that bandwidth limit. Yet had they gone with, say, HD-SDI, or something based off of that, using a decent piece of RG-6, they'd have had room to spare, less signaling issues with the 30 different wires (or however many are in there,) and less need for resynchronization/retiming circuits at the receive-end.
But that's all a different story that, unfortunately, we're kind of stuck with. The things that make some HDMI cables better than others are related more to physical build-quality. If you accidentally bend it around too tight a corner, will any of the internal wires break? Can you bend it around a corner at all? Are the pins actually connected to the wires? Little "quality control"-like things.
And where Jeff is getting to, is if you get the $30 cable and it works, it works, with no advantage to the $300 cable.
