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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?"
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.
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).