What They Say
There’s a minor ‘storm in a teacup’ over the news that Yamaha has offered to replace some circuit boards in its earlier HDMI 2.1 AV receivers, but has capped the bandwidth at 24Gbps, rather than the full 48Gbps that is allowable in the specification.
The company seems to have been clear in its advertising of what the receivers can support, but users do not always seem to have understood what it meant.
What We Think
For a number of years, at several trade shows per year I gave HDMI Licensing a hard time about the way that it had developed the specification and the labelling requirements. Eventually, I gave up as it was clear that it was in the ‘nature of the beast’ and that its members were not going to give up the immense flexibility of the approach of allowing most features to be optional. My view was, and is, that HDMI Licensing should have allowed this flexibility, but have a small number of ‘tested use cases’ that guaranteed the inclusion of certain sub-sets of features. One of the use cases was for receivers.
I have been watching and reporting on HDMI since it was first launched in 2002 (when HDMI Licensing was set up by Silicon Image), but it still took hours of research to work out what features that I needed in the receiver that I bought when I upgraded mine last year. The reality is that a receiver is a 5 to 10 year purchase for most people, so ‘upgrade proofing’ is a key part of the buying decision. (BR)
This table of HDMI Formats indicates why HDMI support is so complex. Chart – HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc. Click for higher resolution
