Being a techie, I found this enteresting (if not a forgone conclusion)...

[HEMI6point1]

You know how when you buy something like a big-screen TV at a retail store the salesperson starts trying to push the "high-end" Monster cables and such?

Well here is a video on a Canadian TV news channel: CBC.ca - Marketplace - Is an expensive HDTV cable really better than a cheap one?

It's always funny when a $12 HDMI cable gives the same performance as a $250 one. After all, it's digital, either the signal gets there or it doesn't.

Monoprice.com has the 6' HDMI 1.3a cables for $12.85 - shipping included.

 

[willy]

The same argument was raised back in the 70's when it came to high-end audio cable.

$20 a foot Monster cable..or a cord from a lamp..no difference that the human ear could handle.

 

[clwill]

You need to look at Audiophile magazine or some other high-end publication and look at the "interconnects". There are companies like Kimber cable and others making cables that make even the most expensive Monster cables look cheap. They sell cables at over $250 A FOOT! A pair of speaker cables can run you ten grand.

Back in 2001, I was fortunate enough to get a tour of Monster's main facility in San Francisco, thanks to a friendship with a senior executive there. We toured this huge 250,000 sq. ft. place, with dozens of ladies (mostly asian) sitting at little workstations diligently soldering gold ends on cables.

Back in the corner I could see the main raw material - huge reels of cables they purchased. There was a team cutting these cables into lengths and feeding them into a machine that applied a fancy wrapping layer with the Monster logo. The name on the side of the huge reels and on much of the cable they were cutting? Belkin...

 

[HEMI6point1]

Back in the corner I could see the main raw material - huge reels of cables they purchased. There was a team cutting these cables into lengths and feeding them into a machine that applied a fancy wrapping layer with the Monster logo. The name on the side of the huge reels and on much of the cable they were cutting? Belkin...

LMAO! This is too funny! Thanks for telling me this. At this point the only thing that Monster makes that's not an overpriced scam is their power centers.

 

[downtime]

"Back in the day" when I had a retail facility we stocked all kinds of computer cables and connectors, especially the type of stuff thet people could not find at most stores.

Thanks to the Radio Shack type places in the world where these items were marked up many hundreds of percent, we could always beat retail prices by several dollars and still make a huge percentage on each sale.

For example... We used to buy 15 foot parallel cables for a buck fifty each, sell them for twelve dollars, and still beat the retail outlets by seven fifty... This is going back a few years but even things like serial adapters that we could buy for twenty five cents we would sell for five bucks and nobody else in town had them at the time. However it takes a whole lot of sales to pay the rent on small dollar items, but they added profit to the big dollar items that had a very small markup in them.

 

[HEMI6point1]

When I worked at Radioshack, the rep for Monster Cable told us of a special "employee discount" program that was deeper than the regular one. On monster cables and power centers, we got 70% off and they STILL made a profit on them!

 

[Jim]

Back at Christmas we upgraded to a Blue Ray DVD. I did not pick up and HDMI cable at the time as I thought my dad had an extra one at his house. Of course he didn't as it was at their vacation home. So back to Best Buy I go. Just as I walk into the cable are the salesman asks me what I am looking for. I tell him, and I figure he is going to point me to the expensive Monster cables, instead he hands me the mid range, which was still like $60, and walks away. I put it right back and grab the ones for $35.

 

[Nitrohaulic]

I used to haul Pepsis and there was a chart on a wall that broke down the cost of everything. The cap was the most expensive, then the bottle, then the label, then the liquid that you're actually consuming. Grand total of all of it was still well under dime. I never buy extended warranties, etc. I buy the cheapest in anything unless I'm convinced of a valid REASON as to why I should pay more for something.

A woman at Autozone was pushing an additive at the register, saying "I use it in my car." I didn't want to elaborate! I'm sure she's a chemist/metallurgist and knows for a fact that what's in that bottle is actually going to work out to have been cost effective when it's all said and done.

 

[.]

The same argument was raised back in the 70's when it came to high-end audio cable.

$20 a foot Monster cable..or a cord from a lamp..no difference that the human ear could handle.

Depends on the ears! Some people say it makes no difference, other like me say it can. And since you're from C.R. all you had to do was go down 1st. Ave to Zuber's Sound Around back in the 70's where you could hear a big pair of Ohm speakers hooked up with regular 18 ga. zip cord and another pair with the early Monster speaker cable. You had to be nearly deaf to NOT hear a difference.

I've done my own tests with a few different sets of cables and between a certain two (Monster Interlink 400's and some cheap Kimber Kable PBJ's) I could pick it right every single time.

A few years ago somebody set up an ABX comparison test to try to prove an audiophile wrong. The guy (audiophile) did so well that not only could he tell the cables apart with 100% accuracy, he could even tell when the relays iin the comparator were being inserted into the signal chain! You don't do that good by guessing, that's great hearing.

As far as "After all, it's digital, either the signal gets there or it doesn't." I can say that's not necessarily true. I've seen cheap cables have problems at a certain distance (both HDMI and DVI) while better quality cables had no issues at that distance and even many feet further.

Since I do telecommunications for a living and handle CAT 5 and CAT 6 nearly every day I know there's a lot more to it than "either the signal gets there or it doesn't." There's signal attenuation, impedance matching problems, delay skew, propagation delay, NEXT (near-end crosstalk), FEXT (far-end crosstalk), PSNEXT (power-sum near-end crosstalk), ELFEXT (equal level far-end crosstalk), TDR (time-domain reflectivity), Return Loss, etc. All that just for using twisted pairs in a tight group that does a relatively good job of cancelling out noise, EMI, RFI, etc at 100 mhz (CAT 5) and 250 mhz (CAT 6) so you have your internet. Now go even higher in bandwidth to what you're dealing with Category 2 HDMI (340 mhz) and all of those things that I mentioned about CAT 5 & 6 become even more critical. So if you were truly a techie you'd know there's a heck of a lot more to it than just "After all, it's digital, either the signal gets there or it doesn't."