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I researched this same topic, and it led me to blue jeans cable, named so because their aim is to be, simply, an unpretentious commoditized version of "name brand" cables.

As most other posters here seem to be reinforcing, Monster and the like are short on specs and long on "voodoo" - though they look nice. The fact is, using high quality materials, tools, and techniques isn't rocket science.

http://bluejeanscable.com/store/speaker/index.htm

Speaker cable is a bit different from a lot of the interconnect cables we handle, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn't required.

If you don't want to belive me, and since I'm just some schmo on the internet you shouldn't, do a search on Monster Cable at either of these websites, and read the consensus opinions.

Avs Forum
HDTVoice

If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable

Some types of digital streams have error correction; some don't. CDDA for instance, has error correction, though some formats (HDCD) sacrifice some of it for enhanced fidelity (20bit vs 16bit) audio. Some formats are checksummed only (so you can detect a bit error but not correct it)

Generally, though it's the formats themselves that have the error correction and the interlinks are supposed to be good enough not to have bit errors.

On DVI you have a lot of parallel data channels (ie data moving over multiple pairs of cables), low voltage signalling, and a very high datarate too (up to 5gbps). The main problems you have to battle with cable quality in this circumstance are jitter and interference. The interference is the same thing as with analog cable, except that it's manifested differently in digital -- as bit errors. A simple analogy for jitter is bits arriving out of order or out of sync on differnt cable paths. Some pairs may be physically longer than others due to being twisted tighter or stretched out when a cable was wound onto a spool. The receiver is, for the sake of an example, expecting to read the status of 8 bits on 8 wires when a pulse comes over a 9th wire. If the physical wire carrying one of those bits is 1cm longer than another pair, the time difference of a few nanoseconds might mean that the incorrect bit is read from the wire. The longer the cable is, the more likely it is that either or both of these problems will increase enough to cause bitstream errors. The longer cable makes a bigger antenna to receive intereference and the longer length means that there is a higher likelyhood that data pairs have a larger length disparity due to varied rates of twisting, stretching, etc. and finally the increased resistance of the cable can drop the (already low) voltage down to where the ADC cannot reliably reassemble the digital stream.

Personally, I try to buy quality cables whenever possible without going insane about it. I'd rather get it right the first time than get a sub par cable somewhere and have to take the time to troubleshoot it. I have gotten stuff from Blue Jeans Cable before and found that they take a pretty no-nonsense approach to selling good cables that are designed for specific purposes. I plan to trust their 15m DVI cable when I get a projector, and that's probably the most insane/extreme cable they sell.

Overpriced cables like monster are a stupid waste of money, but he did not hawk a brand there. You can't just wire everything up with unshielded 24awg wire and expect to get away with it. Proper cabling is very important in any setup - phone, video, electrical, audio, etc. A lot of the cheap cables really are cheap and do not do a good job of eliminating interference. Good connectors are important too. I ran into the connector problem when wiring the coax for cable tv in my last house. I got decent RG-6U coax, but skimped on the connectors. I had a heck of a time getting a good signal with a modulator in the high frequency catv ultra-band (channels 88-96) despite using a bandpass filter, etc. Good termination (along with a power filter on the CATV amplifier) would have most likely alleviated this problem.

If you want good cables at fair prices, check out Blue Jeans Cable or something similar. They won't try to sell you some special $30 "modem cable" or $40 USB cable like best buy/monster cable either.

I'd be more concerned about the picture quality loss from using analog component cables - a DVI connector would solve that, as someone else has pointed out.

I'm currently sending 1080i as analog component video over 60 feet. Such a long length does muck up higher frequency signals, but it has no perceivable effect on HDTV.

(I will admit these are some pretty darn expensive coax ... the cables came from Blue Jeans Cables.)

Belden 7710A from Blue Jeans Cable, who will also custom make your desired length.

True, the longer the length, the higher the high frequency loss; luckily, analog component video at 1080i doesn't suffer noticeably (even more than 50 feet, if you can believe some AVS Forum members). Apparently, you can go quite a distance from your equipment closet to your high-def projector, plasma, CRT, or what-have-you.