Problems with screen flicker on Denon AVR over HDMI

[jonathanq]

Hello,

I am new to this forum (and fairly new to building a Home Theatre in general).

I was looking for a good sub $1000 receiver that had 4 HDMI inputs. I settled on the Denon AVR-889 (Managed to get it for under $800). I had also looked at the Yamaha HTR 6190 and 6290 - but they were considerably more than the AVR-889 - and the 889 had all the features I wanted.

I hooked it up last night and plugged both my HD-DVD player and my Shaw Pace Tahoe HD PVR into the receiver through HDMI. I then took a third HDMI cable and hooked it up to my Sharp Aquos TV.

Everything seemed fine at first - but then after awhile the screen started to flicker on the HD-DVD player, and to jump around and to strange things on the PVR (I would almost say it was flickering - but it was not quite the same as it was for the HD-DVD player - more like the image just jumping around).

The flicker I was seeing with my HD-DVD player was quite often and would flash from the movie to a screen of snow (or whatever you call it when you unplug a cable vision cable from your tv).

Immediately I thought it might be the $15 dynex HDMI cable I picked up at Futureshop - so I unplugged it and used just the two HDMI cables I had purchased at Costco a while back (part of a Wirelogic HDTV cable kit). I still had the same issue. Sometimes it would be fine, most of the time it would flicker.

At first I figured the Reciever was defective. But I did some searching and found a few posts regarding the HDMI cables.

One of the salesguys said that there are not "versions" on the HDMI cables - there is just higher quality and not so high quality (higher quality being able to handle the bandwidth I guess).

So I guess my question is this:
Does it sound like it's a receiver issue? Or is that a common symptom of a poor HDMI cable?

The two HDMI cables I used were ones I have been using for about 10 months. However up until now - they have always been used for Video only (I used coaxial or optical output for audio).

So could it be that these cables - while they worked fine for just video - can't handle the bandwidth of video + audio? I am totally new to this and of course the logical culprit is the Receiver as it is the only new thing added. But I can't ignore the fact that it could also be an HDMI cable issue.

I am not going to go to Futureshop and buy monster cables to try. However I was planning on ordering some speaker wire from Monoprice soon, maybe it is worth adding in 3 or 4 HDMI cables from there (since they are cheap) and use those instead.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. I'd hate to think that I chose poorly with the Denon..I heard good things about them. And I just couldn't justify the extra $300 to $400 for the Yamaha model.