I would love for these cable manufactures with multiple price points of HDMI cables explain how the encryption works on HDMI as it would totally discount their more expensive products. Every pixel (TDMS character) has it's own unique encrypted key thanks to HDCP, furthermore if the data doesn't correctly arrive, the pixel can't be unecrypted and does very bad things to video and audio.. (i.e. appears as white square artifacts on the screen)
Audio can sound poor over HDMI because it gets converted to a bit rate that matches the video rate. It can only be bad because of how it's converted and recovered, it has nothing to do with the HDMI cable as it's also encrypted in the same way the video pixels are. So get an Oppo with two HDMI outputs (or like product), send Video over one hdmi port to the TV and audio only over the other to the AVR and that solves most of the issue with audio, but you still have to deal with the audio clock recovery. Only way around the clock recovery is to not use HDMI for audio.
Kudos for AudioQuest for discounting that video, but their vast price points should warning as well.
