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Are 'Monster' Cables Worth It?
Digitarius asks: "Are "Monster" cables really better, or are they just more expensive? I'm setting up my HDTV, and I can get Component video cables made by Belkin for half the price of the Monster cable equivalents. Are there any actual stats or studies to back up Monster's claims of superiority? So far most people tell me to get the Monster cables, 'just to be sure,' but what's the real truth?"
it doesn't matter if WE can hear a difference, if you cannot then it is not worth the money for you, even if money is not an issue as you claim.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
When I got into audio I thought all of these things mattered, but I slowly realized that I couldn't tell the difference. Much like I can't tell the difference between a diamond with E color and F color. 12 years ago back a company introduced a cable that somehow carried different frequencies at different rates or some other similar magic - I really can't remember. A friend of mine swore he could tell a difference, I couldn't. He dropped hundreds on the cables, I didn't.
Visit one of your friends who is recommending monster cable, listen to his system. Swap the cables with lower-end ones, and see if you can tell the difference. That hour of time may put your mind at ease.
" To be honest, I haven't seen other cables perform as well."
In what context? Did you engage in double-blind testing? Was there a control? What do you mean by "perform?"
"We are ordered by Corporate to not use the demo on ANY other brand of protector besides 'Monster'"
The reason for that rule is simple. Any other protector will give the exact same results as the Monster one. Monster is not a cable company, it is a marketing company. They take components that are no better than standard ones (often manufactured in the same factories and then branded) and market them at a higher price-point.
Insecure and gullible people assume that the high price is justified, when in fact their products provide zero benefit.
Not to sound cruel or flamebait-ish, but you are either very naive, or else a Radio Shack/Monster shill.
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But if you spend thousands on components, why skimp on a $10 cable vice a $50 one? The price difference is negligable. It's like complaining about a WinXP license on a $20k server. Just buy big and never worry.
It's very interesting listening to the difference between scientists and marketers. I work with both. Scientists always want to make a better product, without wasting resources. Marketers always want to make a product seem better while being cheaper to produce. The most common advice from Marketers to scientists is "raise the price."
For some reason purchasers often assume that a greater price indicates a better product. Often the best way to make your product seem superior in the eyes of consumers is to price it higher than everyone else's. It works too. Otherwise people like you would not describe the quality of their components in terms of how much they cost.
First off, don't ask audiophile questions on /. unless you want to be told that a bit is a bit and how it gets from point A to point B doesn't matter.
Yup. Lots of people with scientific minds here. They care about facts and how things work. If you want I can sell you very poorly made components and cables at high prices. You'll probably even think they sound better. (Maybe someone like Monster has beaten me to it.)
But, if you spend thousands anyway, why skimp on Radio Shack cables?
The original post said that price was not a concern. The question was about the quality of Monster cables relative to other cables. Are they better or just higher priced? It is a very valid question that you don't really answer.
It's like complaining about a WinXP license on a $20k server. Just buy big and never worry.
On Slashdot this has to be a troll. But it is a troll that brings out a very real problem with Linux. The functional value of Linux is often demonstrably better than Windows, especially for servers. Since the price is free, however, people perceive it as less valuable and less useful. Luckily there are plenty of companies ready to charge you money for free things.
I noticed that I had much better colour (indicating that before I was suffering from signal degradation), and the lines displayed by my TV were sharper.
My empirical observations have proven your physics theory to be false;
Do you have those plots handy? What device were you using to measure colour and sharpness? Without hard numbers, it's really difficult to show that you weren't actually just really excited about the really expensive cables you just bought and tricked yourself into thinking that they were better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the cables might not have a better picture.
There is also capacitance and inductance to take into account. Video sits around 4MHz (off the top of my head). At frequencies like that you can definitely have cable effects too, which essentially results in a low-pass filter. This would attenuate the more subtle details (edge sharpness for example).
> My empirical observations have proven your physics theory to be false
Must be a new kind of science. MONSTER SCIENCE.
Any decent shielded cable will do
> can tell you that there definitely is a significant improvement in signal quality (except for digital signals of course; digital is digital)
Well no, you're wrong there. Cheap ethernet cables can knock you down to 10 megabit when you can't push a fast or gig ethernet signal through a crummy wire. Yet oddly, you don't see people buying Monster ethernet cables, probably because when it comes to network cables, most people actually do know that there's a cutoff threshold beyond which it's nothing but price.
And, really, that's all that goes on. The back of an entertainment center is full of EMI. Shielded cables will stop EMI, and make the signal look better.
And which cable you use is important, at least which kind of cable. Buy the 'highest' you can to connect any two devices, starting at component (YCrCb), then s-video, then RCA, then coax if that's all you've got. For audio, forget all that...go digital. (You can go digital with video, too, but not reasonably.)
And buy shielded. And make sure you go gold to gold and silver to silver. (I find it easiest to stay in silver.)
But you don't need to buy into Monster's technobabble. You can get shielded cables for a lot cheaper.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
...which has exactly zero to do with how those bits got to the DAC in the first place. Since the OP mentioned hard drives, I'll assume he was referring to playing audio from a computer. Here's how this would work:
Note how there's no direct connection between "transport" and "DAC" in the diagram above; as long as the CPU gets the rights bits in the right order, the end result will be the same.
By the way, here's a sample of the source he was quoting:
Oh, just to make sure we know where he stands:
Yeah. "Sparkle", "immediacy" (WTF?), "wetter", and "width" are effected by the label on the batch-produced CDR. Here's to hoping that he posts a followup article on which brand of DVD gives a higher Doom 3 framerate.
People who say stuff like that are freaks and should be ignore or ridiculed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?