The difference is in the maximum voltage that each must accept: CL2 must accept up to 150 volts, while C元 must accept up to 300 volts. In-wall-rated cables are made to resist fire (like during a power surge or if something nearby is burning) and not give off toxic smoke if they do burn.įor such cables, look for one of two National Electric Code (NEC) certifications: either Class 2 or Class 3 (abbreviated as CL2 and C元).
Professional installers use in-wall-rated HDMI cables for this purpose, and so should you if you’re doing the work yourself. If you’ve hung your TV on the wall and now want to run your cables inside the wall to keep them out of sight, you likely won’t be able to use an HDMI cable already on-hand. You want to hide your HDMI cable inside the wall If you bought a 4K TV with a true 120Hz refresh rate, like for use with a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, you should move up to an Ultra High Speed HDMI cable. A Premium High Speed HDMI cable should cover the highest demands you’d ask of a 4K TV with a 60Hz refresh rate.
The higher you go with refresh rate and bit depth-and the less color data compression you opt for-the more data that will be pushed to your TV.Īccordingly, you’ll need an HDMI cable that has adequate bandwidth.
The more detailed versions of the guidelines matter if you want more than just a basic TV signal: If you play video games at more than 30 frames per second, for example, or you intend to make full use of an HDR TV, or you want an HDMI cable that can also carry data over ethernet (most people do not, but that bandwidth can be used for other things).įor these types of scenarios, you must take refresh rate (measured in cycles per second, stated as Hertz, and abbreviated as Hz), the level of color precision (aka color depth, measured in bits e.g., 8-bit, 10-bit, or 12-bit), and color data compression (i.e., chroma subsampling) into consideration.