Warned woman against spending $260 on monster cables
I’ve been railing against the monster cable rip-off for some time and I was surprised by a real-life encounter today. I was shopping today in an electronics store and I saw a woman paying for two $130 HDMI monster cables next to me. I won’t mention the store name because all electronics stores do this and try to get their customers to buy the most expensive cable possible despite the fact that there isn’t a shred of difference. I looked at the cables and then looked at her and her only remark to me was “expensive cables”. I said yes, they’re real expensive and you’re wasting your money since there isn’t a shred of difference. She then explained that the salesman told her to get these and I told her a quick search on the Internet and she’d find something like these $9 cables which are actually 2 foot longer than the ones she was getting for $130.
There will always be someone somewhere who will try to claim that some engineer told them that there was a difference between monster HDMI cables and regular HDMI cables. The problem is that this is only partially true and the part that’s true is totally irrelevant to the picture and sound in your HDTV and speaker system. The more expensive cabling might measure within a tighter tolerance but it’s irrelevant in the digital world because the signal is rounded off. So when a digital stream of data comes in and the measured is well within the threshold for rounding off to the correct value of 0 or 1, getting a an even more precise signal is irrelevant. Furthermore, even if there is an error in the data transmission, there are error correction capabilities in the HDMI standard that can fix some small errors.
So while one might claim some theoretical benefit for using monster cables on analog audio and video signals – and I doubt the average person can see or hear the difference – there isn’t even a theoretical benefit to using monster cables for HDMI. Retailers know that consumers are willing to spend a lot more money on anything if they perceive a benefit and monster cables are simply a monster rip-off.
UPDATE 12/30/2008 – One thing I didn’t mention is that on a purly technical level, all data transmission mediums have some level of error. For short-haul pins that transport billions of bits per second of data from your computer’s memory banks to the central processor, we’re talking about maybe one incorrect bit every few years. For consumer applications, that’s not a big deal if the computer has a glitch once every blue moon. For mission critical servers where there is zero tolerance for errors, more expensive memory with error correction is used.
Applying this concept to HDMI cables, the cheaper HDMI cables will have higher error rates than the more expensive HDMI cables. But the rate of error is extremely tiny to begin with and the HDMI protocol has error correction. It’s conceivable that every once in a blue moon that some of those errors are non-recoverable and there are no opportunities to retransmit with HDMI due to the lack of buffering which would have introduced additional latency. That means it is theoretically possible that you’ll see a few more screwed up pixels over the lifetime of your device using the cheaper cables than the more expensive cabling. Since there are 2 million pixels per frame and 60 frames every second, the error would only be noticeable if you analyzed the data stream with a computer over the lifetime of the product. If that’s worth paying an extra $120 for each HDMI cable you buy (remember you need many of these cables) and you’ve got the money to burn, then be my guest but you’ve been warned.
So true!! So sad!!!
So did she actually buy them?
I was going to pick up two HDMI cables but couldn’t stomach paying $26 each for the cheapest ones at Walmart.
Wound up waiting a week, but got a pair for $15 including shipping.
I just bought a HDMI to DVI cable for my computer and the two big chain stores in my town offered a $39.99 backoff option. I went to a local computer shop and bought a black cable for $15 which was 2.5 feet longer and works perfect. I think the salesmen in these big chain stores don´t really know that their overpriced cables are not better. I´m sure the salesman was convinced that I could not get a true HD picture without a very expensive cable. I run my 1080p monitor attached to a HDDVD with a $7.00 cable I bought from overstock and as far as I can tell I get a perfect picture.
If she listens to my advice and does a quick search on the Internet, then she’d have buyer’s remorse and return them.
The salesman do as they are trained. They make a commission off these cables and they’ve been told that the signal is better and that’s all they need to know. It’s better if they don’t know so that they don’t have to worry about the morality of it all.
Well they make more money by selling that specific $130 cable than selling 10 regular cables.
Roy, there are no "regular" $10.00 cables in stores. I’ve never seen them for less than $40.00.
George, the sales staff in places like Best Buy aren’t paid a commission, but I agree they are just doing as they’re told. With that said, I’ve bought them there for my parents, because they tossed out the HDMI cables I bought for them 2 years ago from Monoprice, and I had to get the system setup before I went back home. The only thing worse than getting ripped off on the cables is having the salesman tell me how great a deal it is.
Fry’s has $8 gold-plated HDMI cables. It’s just that the sales associates will tell you to get the monster cables for better results.
The ONLY place where I have ever used Monster cable was speaker wire 1) because I bought a pair of wire spools at the swap meet for 60% off retail. 2) It was for my car where the extra insulation was useful 3) there actually was a noticeable difference in the interference. Every other use is pretty much bogus. Especially digital – and I have tried many times to inform my family the same. They actually used reverse market dynamics theory as a backup – “They wouldn’t be so successful if they wasn’t a difference” and “IF there’s no difference, why doesn’t the cheap cable mfgr use that in their marketing?” …ugh…
George…you’ve saved my life…or at least $20. I would have never thought of checking Overstock.com for HDMI cables…or anything for that matter but…I’ve seen the light.
Generally, I find monoprice is the cheapest place to get quality cables, but if you’re getting free shipping, it may turn out to be cheaper going to some other site.
I suspect they make cables for many of the companies that are in stores at much higher prices.
George is right for the most part, but what he isn’t telling you is that your failure rate in your components are much much higher than your HDMI cable. I know for a fact that your cheap DVD or even high def player is likely to read a bit wrong off of a disc than any digital cable.
For me, I simply think of this as a network cable. Either it works, or it doesn’t. Yes, there is some mediums at which you simply replace the cable and go on, but I don’t get a CAT 7 cable where 100 Mbps is needed unless I happen to be running cable through a welding shop, and then I have to ask myself, who is the idiot who needed a computer in the welding shop?
Too true, too true!
It’s ridiculous. And they’ll sell anything they think they can spin the benefit of. Before I left a big box retailer a few years ago, one of the last thing I purchased with my discount was a "high performance", gold plated S/PDIF cable.
Yes, S/PDIF is a fiber optic cable. I have no idea what marketing genius thought selling a gold plated version was a good idea, but I purchased it for the sheer novelty factor for like $3 with my discount. they probably charged customers $50 for those…
The great tragedy of monster cables are that they are extraordinarily high-quality. They are superbly engineered, and just a joy to use, and for analog applications, there is *some* limited benefit.
But they completely fail from a cost-benefit point of view. Even on analog where there can be come argument that it’s more than just a scam. There is either not enough benefit to be worth it, or there’s no benefit for as great as a cable as it is.
It’s a bit like using a quad core cpu to run the fuel injector on your car, or your home thermostat, or your toaster. Sure you can probably get more precision out of it, but what’s the benefit of that level of engineering for that application?
I’ve actually "stood watch" in the electronics stores myself from time to time. Just a gentle nudge to potential "victims" every now and then to keep them from paying 10 times too much for a friggin’ cable.
Sometimes they still opt to buy it beacuse they’re impatient and don’t want to wait for delivery. But, at least they know!
Good job, George!
It use to be that monster cable came with better connectors and better insulation on the cables. This isn’t always true today but is true in some cases.