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Apr 06, 2024

THX Reveals First THX

Renowned AV electronics tuning, technology and certification company THX Ltd has announced that it’s just awarded its THX Certification high performance guarantee to a range of 8K-capable HDMI 2.1

Renowned AV electronics tuning, technology and certification company THX Ltd has announced that it’s just awarded its THX Certification high performance guarantee to a range of 8K-capable HDMI 2.1 cables for the very first time.

The cables in question are the PXLGlass 8 and Series 8 home theater interconnect range from Canadian brand Pixelgen Design Inc - and the THX certification matters for the simple reason that it essentially guarantees a high level of transfer performance and consistency over the Pixelgen Design cables between cutting-edge HDMI sources.

The more data HDMI cables have to carry, the more difficult it is for them to successfully carry all that data between devices without the signal suffering signal degradation or failing completely along the way. This has become particularly problematic with the new HDMI 2.1 specification, which requires the carriage of sustained data rates up to 48Gbps - enough to carry 4K/120Hz with HDR and VRR or 8K/60Hz signals.

The THX-Certified PXLGLASS 8 HDMI cable.

If you’ve got a source and display cable of handling those sorts of video feeds, simply buying the cheapest HDMI cables you can find almost certainly won’t get the job done, leaving you facing such problems as image drop outs, audio loss, sparkles in the picture and even completely blank screens. Especially if the cable has to carry the data over any significant distance.

Licensing group HDMI.org has helped consumers find HDMI cables capable of carrying 48Gbps by introducing its own certification process, whereby confirmed 48Gbps-capable cables get to sport an Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable badge or logo on their packaging and marketing materials. While the THX-Certified Pixelgen 8K HDMI 2.1 cables have also earned HDMI Ultra High Speed certification, becoming the first cable brand to achieve THX Certification for full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 8K support required the manufacturer to also pass a swathe of tests from an organisation that’s been famous for decades for the stringency of its requirements. Among the performance features THX monitored were:

The most exciting of Pixelgen Design’s two new THX-Certified 8K HDMI cables are the ‘active’ (powered) PXLGLASS 8s. These use premium 4-core OC3 glass fibers to carry the 48Gbps high-speed FRL signals downstream to an 8K display, while using copper-based wires to exchange key low-speed communications such as HDCP 2.3, eARC and CEC. This hybrid approach is key to the robustness and reliability these premium cables need to achieve to pass so much data perfectly over the 7.6m, 10m and 15m cable lengths the PXLGLASS 8s will be available in. Pricing for this active cable range will start at US$389.

The passive Series 8 THX-certified HDMIs are only available in much shorter lengths, as you would expect: 0.5m, 1m, 1.5m and 2m. These much more affordable cables start at US$42.

Both cable ranges are available either directly from pixelgendesign.com or various resellers listed on Pixelgen’s website.