HDMI cable troubles.

Thalandros · June 18, 2015

Hey! I have an issue I've never encountered before and I have no idea how to solve it.

The HDMI cable in question is http://www.profigoldcables.co.uk/catalog/profigold-prol1202-2m-led-tv-hdmi-cable-high-speed-with-ethernet-p-100.html

I know, overpriced as shit, I didn't buy it. But that should guarantee quality a bit atleast, no?

I have two monitors. One being the http://www.iiyama.com/gb_en/products/prolite-e2473hds-1/(Ilyama ProLite 2473HDS) And the other (my main monitor) being the http://gaming.benq.com/gaming-monitor/xl2411z (BenQ XL2411Z)

Both support HDMI, DVI-D and all the widely supported stuff. I am running a GTX 970 in my system, the one by Gigabyte, so I have 3 DP slots, 1 HDMI and 2 DVI slots.

The technical specs out of the way: This morning I got the urge to connect my earbuds to my monitor, so that they wouldn't be in the way. I usually use my desktop headphones, but sometimes I prefer in-ears so I decided to connect them to my monitor, because HDMI supports audio, right?

My Ilyama screen has a 3.5MM headphone output connector so I connected it there. Going to my windows sound panel, the monitor definitely is able to produce sound, but only from the monitor's on-board speakers. The headphones just do not work.

Then I decided to switch the cables around. (I usually have my Ilyama connected to HDMI, and the BenQ to DVI-D). The Ilyama connected fine, but my BenQ doesn't respond to the HDMI? It just tells me ''no signal.'' It has power, is connected to the PC (have re-connected it multiple times) and I have even restarted the PC even though it's hotswappable.

Reversing this alleviates the problem. The monitor can connect fine through DVI-D again.

So, am I dealing with a shitty HDMI cable here? Is it partly broken? Am I doing something wrong? It definitely is able to produce sound, just not over my earphones, and on my other monitor, it doesn't even work!

Any help is appreciated.

kent1147 · June 18, 2015

The problem isn't your HDMI cable.

Yes, HDMI cables can carry audio signals. But that by itself isn't enough. You need some device that can read the audio stream being carried over HDMI, decode it, and output it as analog 2.0-channel audio. It looks like your Iiyama monitor supports headphones... but if it doesn't work for some reason, I'd suggest you do your research on the monitor itself and see if there's some kind of setting you need to change.

As for your BenQ monitor... test the HDMI input capabilities of your monitor by connecting it to some other device that supports HDMI (e.g. another computer, a DVD / BluRay player, a gaming console, etc). It's possible that the issue is a defective HDMI input on the BenQ monitor, so you want to test for that.

On a related note, you generally don't want to plug headphones into monitors. Their audio capabilities (if present at all) are usually throw-away features that they stick into the monitor, which means they use the cheapest possible components to handle audio. That means your audio quality coming from a monitor will be far worse than any other option you have to connect headphones.