Rightly so, you were stunned!

I don't get how it is that ANY manufacturer thinks that their product is right for custom installation when they severely limit the distance between the AVR and the display. Of course, HDMI started out as six feet long, nothing more nohow and never. That is, the idiots who figured out the new supposedly high-tech way of transferring signals didn't realize that the new high-tech installs could not possibly use a technology that didn't just happily flow thirty or forty feet.

"some crap" is the right term. HDMI was designed to work in only the crappier, limited installs!