Odd behaviour with HDMI (long, sorry)

Marsbar

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Hi

We have main Sky Q box and Sony projector in the lounge, split off to a TV in the office and to the kitchen, using daisychained eSynic HDMI splitters/CAT6 senders from Amazon. They're not perfect but good enough (occasional dropouts but not unbearable as long as you run the cable clean).

Today I switched the cheap TV in the office for one with better sound (Sharp TV with HK speakers built in, not amazing but far better than the tinny rubbish in the TV we had). All worked fine. Then we went to sit down to watch Strictly in the lounge and found no picture on the projector.

I assumed something was unplugged, but no. I tried removing various things from the system (we have an HDMI switch for skyq/firetv before the splitter) but it made no difference. Eventually I plugged the projector's hdmi cable directly into the hdmi switch and we had a picture. Happy days - at least the projector is working!

So I assumed the HDMI splitter must have got fried when I switched over the TVs - mea culpa, didn't power-off everything before unplugging. An expensive lesson, but I happen to have a spare eSynic splitter cos originally I was going to extend again to the conservatory (in the end we decided on a second mini box for that TV). So I switched in the new (literally never unboxed) splitter, didn't plug in the cat6 cable (just in case the Sharp TV was doing something odd to the hdmi) and turned the projector back on. Still nothing.

So the projector works when the splitter is taken out of the loop, but the splitter's cat6 output works perfectly, plus the splitter has been replaced and still doesn't work.

I'm a bit at a loss. I've tried dropping the sky signal down to 720 (and even 580) because the eSynic units can be touchy (although that's usually only wrt the cat6-encoded signal), either way it made no difference.

Suggestions would be appreciated. I know that the Sky boxes are notoriously picky with splitters/switches but this has been working for 40 months.

I swapped the PSU on the splitter at the same time, fwiw.

Thanks

Edit: plugged a monitor into the HDMI output in place of the projector and it works fine. So now I'm stumped.
 
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Took the projector down and plugged it in to the splitter with a shorter hdmi cable and it works, so I'm thinking I may have damaged the cable in some way. Odd that it still works with that cable without the splitter though.
 
Had a spare 10m HDMI from the last house. Swapped it out and it's working perfectly. I'm wondering if the second TV was a red herring and the cable just deteriorated. I've routed the new cable further away from the radiator - the old one was running just above the rad under the window sill, now it goes over the window instead.
 

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