HDMI cable seemingly being picky with input sources

[IbraTech04]

Hello LTT Forum! I hope you're all doing great! 

 

Recently I picked up a USB-C dongle from Anker (this one in particular) to hook up my laptop (Dell XPS 13 9310) to my TV. I have a nice media-cabinet setup with HDMI cables running through the walls, into the basement, under the floors, then back into the adjacent wall where my media cabinet is, allowing us to effectively have zero cable clutter under our TV and mount our TV directly on top of the fireplace. We made this setup almost 10 years ago so most of the details are a blur, but I'll try to remember as much as I can. I'm not sure of the generation of HDMI cables we have in the wall, but what I do know is that they are ~10 meters (~30ft) long, give-or-take. If I recall correctly, they were acquired from Monoprice.

 

When I tried to hook up my laptop for the first time, everything on the computer seemed fine (Screen went black to adjust resolution to 1080p, Windows 11 did its little dance with the screen, and the computer seemed to detect the TV both in Settings and in Device Manager), but the TV insisted that there was No Signal. I found this odd, as I had my Chromecast hooked up to the same HDMI cable (with a coupler) moments prior and it was working flawlessly.

 

In an attempt to troubleshoot this, I tried to power the hub with the PD passthrough - Maybe it needed more power to transmit along the long cable? Unfortunately this wasn't the case. Fearing the worst (I've been sent a defective dongle), I tried to hook up my laptop to my HDMI monitor - Which worked fine. Going back to the TV, I used a different (shorter) cable and plugged it in directly into the TV - bypassing the media cabinet entirely. To my surprise, this also worked. The only thing I changed was the HDMI cable used.

 

This leads me to believe the antiquated HDMI cables of yester-year are somehow messing with the signal from my laptop and are the cause of my problem. Before spending time and money to get a newer HDMI cable and test it out that way, I figured I'd post here and see if anyone had any insight as to what else might be going wrong. What's odd is that none of my other appliances have any issue with the HDMI cables - Blu-ray player, Fibe TV receiver, heck! Even my Wii works fine!

I do recall having a similar issue with my Father's old laptop, where it also didn't seem to like the HDMI cables (Didn't like to work through the wall-run HDMI cables, but worked perfectly fine with a manually-run cable) - despite my Mother's laptop having no such issues (both laptops having built-in HDMI ports)

 

Any insight or advice is greatly appreciated,

Thanks in Advance!