In my entire life, nothing in home theater tech has ever worked as advertised. In the olden days, when we just had a CRT television and an antenna, the worst problem was reception whilst vacuuming the carpet. As soon as we hooked up a stereo amplifier to have better sound, we headed down the slide to the current ridiculous situation.

Every effort to improve this has made things demonstrably worse. Remotes don’t work? Fine, let’s send commands up and down the HDMI line. HDMI is too limited? No problem, we’ll create five new HDMI standards. And for each of those different kinds of HDMI, we’ll use the exact same connector but (and here’s the devious part!) we’ll secretly make the insides of the cables different in a way no consumer will ever be able to figure out, so when they hook up a seemingly good cable the picture will get all glitchy. Want more dynamic range? Okey dokey, we’ll make not one, but FOUR different high-dynamic-range standards, some of which have fundamentally different understandings of what we’re even trying to accomplish here, and sometimes the HDMI cable will correctly identify the standard for the output device, but sometimes not, and even if it does, that device may not be able to decode it, in which case will happen.