Has anyone had this work? Redmere HDMI cables from Source to switchers and from receivers to TV's? I bought a bunch of 3 and 6 foot and am using them for a distributed video and couldn't get them to work. Switched for regular HDMI and VOILA.

They are directional and I did check that they were plugged correctly.

Little known fact about HDMI (and Redmere).
In all systems (by HDMI spec) the Sink input (BTW: Sink is any device that receives an HDMI cable) provides the power for the source output, it will also provide power to most active cables (and all Redmeres).
This could be your issue...
What display?
What Matrix?
Which band and model of cables (remember that not all redmere chipsets are the same)?

I have seen many times where active cables will not work with HDBaseT. There really should be no reason that I can think of where you would need to EQ the signal coming from an HDBaseT receiver. Best practice is to simply use standard HDMI cables with HDBaseT and leave the active cables for long runs or crappy sources with direct connections :)

Brent can beat me up if I am spewing crap here, but I thought the idea behind active cables, including Redmere, was to give better signal integrity over long distances. What is the added value of it in a 3-6' cable?

To answer dipdog21 first:

The issue with HDBT and active cables goes back to my post on how the video outputs are powered, since the display powers the source you must make sure that the HDMI in on the Tx side will provide enough juice to run the video out side of the source (or AVR).
We made sure to design our HDBT units (CS-HDBTPOE70/100) to work with Active cables (we sell a lot of them).



Now to Audiophiliac: The original reason for Redmere had nothing to do with signal integrity, it was in fact about making thinner cables. Since that time some changes have been made to the multitude of chipsets and with the proper chip And the proper programming (not Redmere Default) you can improve the EDID channel and EQ for any loss on the High Speed channels (see our MHZ & EHD cables).

For me, Redmere was about smaller cables in equipment racks even though they were short. The bend radius etc makes the final presentation so much cleaner and if they were for a longer run they could actually be pulled :-).

The problem is using more than 1 Redmere between source and display. So going from source to matrix switch (or HDBaseT TX) then via Cat6/7 to HDBaseT RX that uses a short Redmere connected to a display causes issues.

Like many others, I discovered this the hard way. I've used Monoprice cables for years and they now warn about this issue on their Redmere product pages.

They use it in reverse. Keep the signal strength the same but reduce cable thickness.

We were using them because of the super small size. They go great behind TV's flat on the wall. And in the rack they are a lot easier to dress.

Oh well - replaced with normal HDMI cables and all worked fine so I guess we just won't use them for video matrix anymore.