Customers Gleefully Mock Best Buy's $1,095.99 HDMI

First time accepted submitter Forthan Red writes "It may be a pricing bot run amok, or a ridiculously over-inflated sense of worth, but Best Buy has been offering an HDMI cable for a whopping $1,095.99 (currently sold out!). While Best Buy seems to be oblivious to the absurdity of this price for a digital cable, those posting customer reviews are not. Enjoy the mockery!" One of my favorites is: "saved a ton of money on a new TV on black Friday and decided to use the extra cash to get the best cable available. At a whopping 3.3 feet in length, this cable is no joke. When all my friends come over to watch football, they always say 'WOW what kind of HDMI cable do you have?' I proudly tell them about my audioquest diamond and its advanced features such as its Dark Gray/Black finish. It is a great conversation piece! Not to mention it fits into my dvd player and tv perfectly."

Comments

They may be mocking the price but

[InterestingFella]

There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Timbo]

Can't tell if troll or not. HDMI is a digital interface so cable quality isn't all that important.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

So, you are saying you really believe that this is an $1100 cable and that people actually buy these? This cable manages to transcend the laws of physics somehow, and while other digital cables either transmit the 100% digital signal, or don't, this one manages to transmit more than 100% of the 0s and 1s and delivers more data than was fed into it? Or do you really not understand how digital data works?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very true for many cables used in analog applications, for instance, when running a cable from an amplifier to a speaker, you want a nice thick, shielded cable to get the best sound quality with as little noise as possible. This is not true in digital applications. If a HDMI cable were made that was of such poor quality that some of the signal could not get through, the picture would simply not show up. Due to the fact that it's digital, a $6 wal-mart cable will literally get the (exact) same data through to your TV that this cable will, in precisely the same way that a $10 usb/dvi/ethernet cable will when compared to higher quality cables.

Because it's all 1s and 0s going though the cable, there will be no degradation of data, unless there's something really, really wrong with the cable, and in that case it just won't work at all.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[plate_o_shrimp]

The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for tax writeoffs.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely correct. I'm a professional audio/visual user like you describe, and we have some serious needs that just can't be met by consumer-grade cables and other equipment.

When I'm watching football with the guys, we need to have the best picture and sound quality possible. Just like we need to have the best nachos, the best salsa and the best brewskies, we need to have the best TV and the best HDMI cables, too.

When the players are bent over before the hike, we need to see ever ass contour. We need to see the tight spandex pulled over the hairy butt of a 350 lb African American offensive guard in perfect detail. We need to see exactly what body parts are massaged during a hard and powerful tackle when two strong men grope and fight each other for the ball. Speaking of the ball, we need to see each and every ball with crystal clear perfection. When the player slap each other on the bum after a touchdown, we need to see and hear the slap as if it were our own asses being hit.

Football is the most heterosexual sport there is. That's why me and the guys like to get together and watch it. No women allowed! Maybe if you watched a sport like football that wasn't so pansy you'd understand where we're coming from and why we need the best cables and the best audio visual devices.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.

Um, no, trollface. Professional products do not have descriptions like this:

This HDMI cable features a Dielectric-Bias System that reduces distortion and 100% Perfect-Surface Silver conductors for improved signal clarity. The Direct-Silver-plated HDMI connectors provide a simple connection and durability.

This is 100% "audiophile" pseudo-science. *This*, on the other hand, is a REAL professional HDMI cable:

http://www.markertek.com/Cables/Video-Cables/HDMI-Cables/Gefen-Inc/CAB-HDMIX1-3-50MM.xhtml?CAB-HDMIX13-150

Note, however, that those are at least 50 foot long (not 3.3) and use fiber-optics to ensure reliable transmission. Oh, and all but the 330 foot version cost LESS than the Best Buy cable...

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[fnj]

AC is a doofus. Speaker cables do not need shielding. The idea is ludicrous.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Dunbal]

Football is the most heterosexual sport there is. That's why me and the guys like to get together and watch it. No women allowed!

I think you should look up heterosexual in the dictionary. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Jawnn]

This is very true for many cables used in analog applications, for instance, when running a cable from an amplifier to a speaker, you want a nice thick, shielded cable to get the best sound quality with as little noise as possible.

False. Shielded cable is worse that useless for speak applications. Moreover, depending on the characteristics of the amp and speaker involved, it's actually beneficial to use speaker wire with an extremely small conductor.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarcasm maybe?

captcha: stiffest ...lol.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless they're giving me a tax "credit" I don't buy the tax "deduction" writeoff.

If I get to deduct the $1500 from my income, assuming a 33% rate, I save $500 in taxes, but I'm still short the $1000 that was spent on the cable. Not a great deal. Now, if it is a "credit," I spend $1500 but get a tax credit of $1500, so the cable cost essentially $0.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should look up heterosexual in the dictionary. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Your sarcasm detector is apparently malfunctioning. For a nominal fee, I can use some high quality HDMI cables to repair it and get it properly working again.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[shentino]

Don't deceive yourself.

HDMI's only purpose is to placate the DRM happy content producers into cooperating with the end users.

All that encryption and decryption baloney does NOTHING to directly enhance the experience, and is only there because without it certain companies *cough*sony*cough* won't play ball.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no, wire cross section does matter, and thicker is better (lower resistance means there is less power lost on the cable and the amplifier sees an impedance that is as close as possible to the bare speaker). In fact, that's the only thing that matters. Any reasonably thick lamp cord will do just fine as a speaker cable.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

At short distances, a metal coat hanger will be indistinguishable from "audiophile" speaker cable in a blind listening test. You've got to laugh at the folks that spend thousands on interconnects, power cables and speaker cables. I liken it to people buying a Bentley instead of a Hyundai when the design requirement is to deliver groceries from point A to point B. However, human nature being what it is, these folks will always find a way to rationalize the expense with smoke, mirrors, and flowery words. And there's always that segment of people who will buy the most expensive of anything simply because they can. *shrug*

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[mwvdlee]

I agree. A professional studio should buy the $5 cable instead of the $1 cable.
Perhaps a laboratory should get the $10 cable and an EMP testing facility might pay $20 for additional shielding.
For safety reasons, I'd go for two or possibly even three of those $20 cables in a satelite or space craft.
But that still begs the question; who'd need the $1095 cable?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[dgatwood]

Sorry, but speaker cables are almost never shielded. The capacitance of a shielded cable degrades the signal unacceptably over long cable runs.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ehrichweiss]

Getting $1500 of income taken off your taxes is not remotely the same as the government giving you a $1500 refund, or you getting the product for free.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[vlm]

With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.

Most people seem to have speaker wires that make great quarterwave dipole antennas annoyingly near the 15M / 10M / 6M ham radio bands or the 11M CB band. The problem is some classical, lets say, pre 00s audio output final power amps have something of a rectifying effect on the incoming RF. So you end up hearing clearly every trucker who drives by. Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable. Assuming your negative speaker lead either can be grounded, or already is grounded, a couple minutes with a swiss army knife and a length of old antenna / cable tv coaxial cable will either result in a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics, or a nice shielded speaker wire ready to install.

You can also spend some dough on RF ferrite chokes, but frankly its usually cheaper to use scrap cable, assuming you have some laying about.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that the Bentley is really just a Hyundai.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Joce640k]

Humor. You don't have it.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[jenningsthecat]

I think you're confusing simple shielded cable with coaxial cable. No, you don't need an impedance-matched transmission line at audio frequencies, but shielding CAN be relevant with some amps in some setups. The wavelength of audio frequencies is irrelevant here - speaker cables can be efficient antennae for RF signals, which can then mix with other RF signals and/or be demodulated in the diode junctions that comprise the bi-polar transistors used in the outputs of many amps. This can cause audible artifacts, including hearing radio stations through your speakers even when there's no tuner attached to your system, especially if you're close to the transmitting tower.

As for kilo-buck HDMI cables, that IS an ultimate stupidity. However, you should be careful regarding this whole 'ones and zeros' business. At the frequencies used for HDMI, (and given the rectangular nature of the signals, frequency response up to ten times the fundamental may be important), you're basically back in the analog realm, with rise times a significant fraction of the total waveform period. Impedance mismatches, slowed waveform edges, and extraneous interference can cause jitter and increase bit error rate, and although you're unlikely to see the difference in a typical home setup, these errors can add up over multiple generations of signal transfer.

So no, there won't be any visible or audible difference between a 10 dollar HDMI cable and a thousand dollar one. Just be aware that you can't stick any old cable in there and expect good results.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[tomhudson]

This cable is NOT used for "professional work" - unless you're thinking of a variant of the worlds' oldest profession - because anyone actually buying one of these is being royally screwed.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JavaBear]

I guess Poe's law applies to more than just religion :)

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Joce640k]

A piece of hollow copper pipe works best due to the extra skin effect.

Plumb the pipes as close to your amplifier and speakers as possible then bridge the remaining couple of inches using 30A electric shower cable. I did this last year and the improvement in sound was remarkable. Even my wife noticed.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[vlm]

Any reasonably thick lamp cord will do just fine as a speaker cable.

Go to your local home improvement store, locate the "12 volt outdoor garden lighting" area, assuming solar hasn't wiped these guys out, you can sometimes pick up off the shelf spools of really cheap heavy gauge stranded two conductor wire.

Theoretically, buying by the foot outta the electricians aisle should be cheaper, however, during one of the commodity boom/runups they were updating the price of the electricians aisle by-the-foot on a seemingly daily basis, but they never updated the price on the pre-printed spools of garden lighting wire. So I was paying maybe 10% over pre-boom per foot price for the garden wire, but I was cool with that because pay-by-the-foot had doubled or tripled and the pre-pack garden wire had not been marked up yet.

For something like the cost of an old fashioned DVD I wired up my whole 5.1 speaker system using garden wire. If I had used "best buy marked up cable prices" it probably would have cost $200 to buy all that wire.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand technology much. All our glorious digital is made with analog signals, and we use points on the wave as on/off points to simulate digital.

It may not matter much, but it's possible.

The cable is stupid.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Timbo]

Yep, I have humour.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot. Technology is religion for most of us here.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

He said that, and he was correct. You are not understanding what he is saying. There is a difference in a tax credit and a tax deduction, and he explained it well. Try reading it again or consult your CPA.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a batch of even better $1500 HDMI cables to sell you. Interested?

Oh, and I have shares for a bridge near Brooklyn, New York that are sure to make you money.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[mysidia]

Denon makes the AKDL1 link cable a Cable that's listed for $10,000; a RJ45/8P8C patch cable, and there are reviewers who swear it's faster, really...

So I guess no... a $1000 cable isn't really any better; to get the real goods you need $10,000 for a cable.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[vlm]

Its on the store side. I was tangentially involved in retail management a long time ago, and you could write off stolen goods as a business loss against whatever profit you made. Things get really flakey WRT wholesale loss vs retail loss and exactly which corporation eats the loss. Having a basically "captive" wholesale supplier means you can pretty much set the wholesale price you'd like, although that is questionably legal.

The other interpretation is the stereotypical housing bubble boom activity was to refinance, then head down to best buy and pick up a $5000 TV. After the refi cash dried up, you can now get the same TV for $500. Imagine that! Theoretically you deduct your mortgage interest so although you're stuck paying for a $1000 cable for 30 years, at least you aren't paying interest on it, compared to paying $25 on a credit card at 29% for probably the same 30 years I'm not entirely sure which is worse and too lazy to calculate it. Also after the housing bubble ended and people stopped paying their mortgage, if they bought the TV more than X months/years ago they can declare bankruptcy and keep the TV, which means the bank writes off the mortgage etc etc and they have a really nice TV in their new apartment.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadian. Nuff said.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[plate_o_shrimp]

geez, do folks not recognize a joke anymore?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I have humour.

Citation needed.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[davidwr]

All that encryption and decryption baloney does NOTHING to directly enhance the experience, and is only there because without it certain companies *cough*sony*cough* won't play ball.

The experience of coughing up $$$ for HDMI- and DRM-encumbered equipment and a $20 Blue-Ray disk is a big "enhancement" over the experience of getting slapped with a lawsuit because I resorted to bootleg copies because the movie I wanted wasn't available in HD on the open market, because the manufacturer was afraid of privacy.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a professional, gold-plated, purified brass bridge?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Humor. You don't have it.

OK I admit to posting a sarcastic response as well, but I think there is an inherent communications flaw based on the programming and design skills of the Slashcode team.

When Timbo replied to a post, "Can't tell if troll or not.", he was actually replying to a post that most people will not see because it is at negative 1. This post in particular:

There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.

To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

Hence the confusion. Timbo may not be as simple-of-mind as the slashdot coders would have you believe.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[vlm]

I agree. A professional studio should buy the $5 cable instead of the $1 cable.
Perhaps a laboratory should get the $10 cable and an EMP testing facility might pay $20 for additional shielding.
For safety reasons, I'd go for two or possibly even three of those $20 cables in a satelite or space craft.
But that still begs the question; who'd need the $1095 cable?

Begs the question is just filler in this application. You're not doin' it right.

As far as tech goes, RF engineering being an area of my expertise, for the most exotic 1.85mm coaxial connectors hand assembled and individually hand tested on a network analyzer and giving your grubby hands a physical printout of that actual individual cables test results, you are looking at around $200 for the connectors and assembly/testing service shipped to your door in a couple days. Think like Pasternack and RFcoax and places like that. You get to pay extra for each inch of the 0.085 rigid coax but thats a rounding error compared to the cost of assembly/testing unless you're using a really unreasonable length of coax...

I would assume if you want milspec traceable soldering technique and ISO9000 certified training for the tech work and xrayed connections and maybe a somewhat higher grade of connector with heavier gold plate, you could drop maybe $500 on a milspec aerospace cable, but I don't think it possible to legitimately spend more.

So your estimate's off by maybe a factor of 20 or so.

Supposedly HP made some weird 1 mm connector that only like 10 people in the world knew how to assemble correctly and cost over $1000 per connector, but I donno anything about that all heresay. I would imagine something that small would be rated over 100 GHz? Maybe 200 GHz?

The point of this RF foolishness is a standard SMA connector itself internally resonates really low in frequency like 18 GHz so if you want to do military radar or whatever you need something better, rarer, which translates to more expensive. The 1.85s are supposedly good to 70 GHz or so, maybe 80 if you can tolerate some frequency dependent matching. Sometimes you just can't use waveguide or justify its size and weight (think of WR-42 waveguide the size of your thumb and heavy as a piece of plumbing pipe, its pretty heavy compared to a 185 connector and some coax...)

You want to make a RF guy cry? Tell him you attached a plain SMA connector to a nice new 1.85 calibration load using a pipe wrench or a hammer or something. There's triple digits flushed down the drain in an instant. Maybe four digits. Cross threading too, that's not cool at those prices.

RF has an intense "knee" around 18 GHz for resonance reasons, you can buy SMA connectors at Mouser for like $2 a piece but you want to go exotic like 1.85 for higher frequencies and instantly you're dropping darn near 3 digits on each connector.

There is no "impossible" in RF, just "impossibly expensive to meet your requirements".

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[datavirtue]

[uncomfortable silence]....HOW ABOUT them Bears!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[diodeus]

I hear if you coat the wire in blue sharpie it makes it work even better!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

Try reading the reviews for this one as well, just as mocking. And while they may list it for $10,000 on Amazon (at one place only, no ratings, just launched with Amazon so likely a test product), the actual review for the cable http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9967991-1.html and they also mocked it as nothing more than an overpriced ethernet cable. And show it priced at $500. The Amazon price is not authentic, just as the Best Buy price likely isn't, although they would likely be happy to take your money.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DarthBart]

Especially if your income is already tax free. I'd love to put a PV solar system in here, but there's no way I can foot the bill. All of the cushy 30% tax credits don't apply because I have zero taxable income.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

This is why we quote excessively.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

God, another idiot.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Khyber]

"Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable"

Tried that and I went from picking up Mexican radio to church radio.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Khyber]

"Actually, no, wire cross section does matter, and thicker is better"

Except speakers are AC devices and as such a thinner wire means less skin effect.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Alan R Light]

Maybe they haven't been around the sort of guys who honestly believe the magical theory of business, by which businessmen make huge profits by buying expensive equipment because the "tax write-off" is greater than the value of the equipment. Coincidentally, of course, this makes it ethical for these same guys to steal/neglect/sabotage this equipment, because the boss will just make more money by paying to replace it.

If you've never actually heard these cretins who believe you must be a sucker to believe otherwise, you wouldn't believe they exist.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[vlm]

Ground the shield not float it? Assuming you have a neg ground amp or at least a floating output?

If you don't want to risk it, some ferrites would probably make quick work out of it, although beware that some ferrite mixes have a granular size and suited to LF like your AM radio app and some suited better for VHF. I know it sounds like audiophool line, but read some ferrite mfgrs databooks (amidon had a good one a long time ago, like in the 80s) and it'll all be explained.

Your best bet is to make nice with your local ham radio guy, who probably knows quite a bit about keeping RF out of his own audio gear... your problem should be easy in comparison.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[scotch]

1 poster plus 4 moderators fail reading comprehension.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite review:

This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be sometime around 2007 for whomever is reading this. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. Something... happens with them. Something came through, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left. WE LIVE UNDERGROUND! ONLY YOU CAN STOP IT NOW. SAVE US. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, a coax cable transmits digital audio and video just as well as an HDMI cable of any price.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Just assume that I have the eyes to read your post.
 
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Re:They may be mocking the price but

[cynyr]

I think a Bentley really is a VW Beetle.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[LynnwoodRooster]

You've got to laugh at the folks that spend thousands on interconnects, power cables and speaker cables.

DISCLOSURE: I've worked in the audio industry (transducer development) for 20 years now, for high end and mass-market brands.

Audio reproduction isn't just an objective event; it's a subjective experience. And just like the environment at the local high-end restaurant lends itself to improving the overall experience of consuming a fine meal, having a gilded cable (or hand-rubbed-walnut ensconced automobile) can improve a person's belief in what they are experiencing.

The attitude a person holds when they sit down to listen to music, or watch a movie, will greatly impact their opinion of that same work. Many people just feel better knowing they spent a lot on a cable or amplifier or speaker or TV, and that enhances the subjective portion of their experience. If that's the case - then who's to say it's a waste or that it's worthless?

For things which are purely subjective in valuation, and 100% discretionary (you need food, water, shelter, power, and to a lesser extent communications and transportation - audio and video, not so much) decrying someone's spending on something they WANT to buy, and that will subjectively enhance their enjoyment of the entire event, is rather short-sighted.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Khyber]

The problem lies within my guitar circuitry. Changing cable type only changes what I pick up.

Right now, I'm getting shortwave Russian radio.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of them might be appreciating the meta-irony. Nobody says the funny mod can't be used for things that are funny in a different way from which the poster intended:)

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation:

Them suckers want to throw away $1000 for a 20 buck cable, who am I to say no to our respected customer's wishes?

And conman selling homeopathic cancer cure made of water and food coloring for $1000 a pop gives people the greatest gift of all, the gift of hope. Would be rather short-sighted to say it won't work, didn't you hear about placebo effect?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[pnewhook]

Except speakers are AC devices and as such a thinner wire means less skin effect.

A thinner wire also means much higher resistance, and can alter audio quality especially with 4ohm speakers. That's why they make stranded cables, and the best stranded cables are individually coated to reduce the skin effect even further.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Nursie]

HDMI != HDCP

You can have HDMI without DRM, and HDCP also works over DVI connections.

HDMI is there because it's a good standard for a digital connection and has smallish connectors.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Ogi_UnixNut]

And the Skin effect is only a problem at high frequencies (think microwave frequencies, 2+GHz). I think the 22Khz max we can hear will not be affected by things like skin effect.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[TCaM]

I hear this so often, but it doesnt make it true. Digital signal can be impaired in a number of ways, so quality matters to a certain extent. It just doesnt matter a whole lot once baseline specs are met.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

And you (and the moderators) should look up the word "idiots". You have no sense or comprehension of humor.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Lershac]

Come to Louisiana... its REFUNDABLE 50% here!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Timbo]

That's basically what I said using more words.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JustOK]

To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

This is why we quote excessively.

no, we don't

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ebh]

Skin effect is measurable at audio frequencies above 10-15KHz, which is to say, in the top octave of normal human hearing. It's measurable, but not necessarily audible, even for the golden-ears types like I was back in my 20's. Back then, I won bets by telling speaker cables apart, The best one was when someone bet me that I couldn't tell the difference between the speaker cable of my choice and 28 gauge single-strand telephone wire--I picked the thickest stuff I could find, and told him which one was louder. Despite all the pseudoscientific crap when vendors spouted (obTopic: "Dielectric bias system"???), I could tell when a particular cable was a better match for a particular amp/speaker combination--using those same cables with a different amp-speaker combination might sound like you threw blankets over the speaker cabinets, or assigned certain frequencies to random points in the soundstage.

That said, I could never tell any difference that I could conclusively attribute to skin effect.

My ears are shot now, decades later, so it's all moot. Lamp cord can't screw up the soundstage any more than the random frequency dropouts in my ears do. On the one hand, I hate not being able to hear the music as well. On the other, I can get by with merely decent gear instead of the expensive stuff, and use the savings on extra symphony tickets.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DinDaddy]

We use some 50 foot HDMI cables at work. About 60-80% of the brands we try would not do 1080p over that length (reasonably well made but of chinese manufacture).

Only ones that have consistently worked are Belden ones from bluejeans cable.

Under 10' virtually everything works.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[wgianopoulos]

IT could make a difference but if the $2 cable you have is getting zero errors there is no way a more expensive cable could even possibly make it sound better.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[plover]

Essentially, what you're saying is buying these cables is almost equivalent to a religious sacrifice, making the purchaser feel better about themselves for the rich experiences they will surely receive as a reward, and that mocking these people is equivalent to mocking the religious for their beliefs.

I see no downside to this.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Maddog Batty]

To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

This is why we quote excessively.

no, we don't

How do you quote?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ColdWetDog]

The problem lies within my guitar circuitry. Changing cable type only changes what I pick up.

Right now, I'm getting shortwave Russian radio.

You need to reverse the polarity!

Sheesh. Kids these days. Don't know anything....

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[davester666]

That's "Whoosh"!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ColdWetDog]

Even my wife noticed.

Yeah, I'll bet your wife noticed. Your living room looks like the plumbing section in Home Depot.

What's not to like?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Lexx Greatrex]

So, you are saying you really believe that this is an $1100 cable and that people actually buy these? This cable manages to transcend the laws of physics somehow, and while other digital cables either transmit the 100% digital signal, or don't, this one manages to transmit more than 100% of the 0s and 1s and delivers more data than was fed into it?

The price $1100 seems about average for cables that transmit 1100100% of the digital signal (where radix=2)

Or do you really not understand how digital data works?

According to Shannon, cables that transmit more or less than the intended signal should be avoided.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Osgeld]

no its pretty much on or off

to simulate analog like audio or whatnot we use points on a wave to sample the amplitude

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JohnnyComeLately]

To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:

Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.

This is why we quote excessively.

no, we don't

How do you quote?

I wonder as well, however I have an HDMI problem and I'm waiting on this new one to fix it so I can watch the "How To" video in 5 D with 13.1 surround!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JohnnyComeLately]

With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.

Most people seem to have speaker wires that make great quarterwave dipole antennas annoyingly near the 15M / 10M / 6M ham radio bands or the 11M CB band. The problem is some classical, lets say, pre 00s audio output final power amps have something of a rectifying effect on the incoming RF. So you end up hearing clearly every trucker who drives by. Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable. Assuming your negative speaker lead either can be grounded, or already is grounded, a couple minutes with a swiss army knife and a length of old antenna / cable tv coaxial cable will either result in a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics, or a nice shielded speaker wire ready to install.

You can also spend some dough on RF ferrite chokes, but frankly its usually cheaper to use scrap cable, assuming you have some laying about.

If anyone reads this and decides to try it, be very careful. I'm somewhat certain grounding a speaker wire will do very bad things depending on the Class of Amp you're using for your home stereo. In other words, I would not try this under most circumstances and with 100% knowledge you might "let the ghost out" of your amps IC board.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ColdWetDog]

I think you should look up heterosexual in the dictionary. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Your sarcasm detector is apparently malfunctioning. For a nominal fee, I can use some high quality HDMI cables to repair it and get it properly working again.

Sarcasm detectors apparently use SATA cables because they're always breaking.

DIE! DIE! Motherless cretin spawn of a left handed paramecium engineer that 'designed' the SATA connector!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DMUTPeregrine]

To be fair it IS high frequency square wave. To properly transmit the "ones and zeros" (rising and falling edge) you would need a cable with infinite bandwidth. Any real world cable will attenuate the signal somewhat. Since it's shielded twisted pair it's a bit harder to keep the impedance constant than with coax. So cable quality can matter, though it normally won't. And when it does you'll see sparklies (mis-decoded pixels) or no image at all, not a decrease in sharpness. All that doesn't mean you need an expensive cable. Especially for short runs (under 15 feet) pretty much any cable will work fine. And even for longer runs there are cheap manufacturers that make good cable, like bluejeanscable. Their 3-foot cable is $15. Spending more than that would be silly. Spending over a thousand dollars is a way to say "I'M RICH".

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[ColdWetDog]

HDMI is there because it's a good standard for a digital connection and has smallish connectors.

Not exactly

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Jawnn]

More precisely, quality matters only to the point that a cable must be able to perform within a given digital protocol's ability to compensate for errors introduced (or not prevented) by the cable. Period. So the $10 HDMI cable, if fabricated properly, will be indistinguishable from the $1,000 cable.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DMUTPeregrine]

There is no such thing as a 100% digital signal. There are no 0s and 1s. There are rising and falling edges of a square wave (or high and low voltages). Impedance mismatches caused by varying twist rates can degrade signal. That, and there's always attenuation of a square wave, to transmit a perfect square wave would take infinite bandwidth. That said, for a 3 foot cable you can have quite a lot of variance and still get a recognizable signal. I could understand $1000 for some sort of active-powered 100 meter cable with built-in repeaters, but not for a 3-foot one.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

Either the digital signal is 100% getting there, or it isn't. That was the point and what is implied. It isn't like analog where getting most of the signal means lower quality but you can still play the source with the lower quality flaws (ie: snow).

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Scarletdown]

AC is a doofus. Speaker cables do not need shielding. The idea is ludicrous.

AC probably also insists on running power through his cables before using them first to break them in, using $485 wooden stereo knobs, vertical turntables, and Monster Cables.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

You should buy some audiophile grade SATA cables, then.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Alsee]

i don't know if anyone will ever get this message, but if you do you have to come save us. oh god. you must come save us! we're slowly going insane each day. each day. each day. many of us are already gone. just siting and starting endlessly. or just screaming. the screaming never stops now. i don't know what happened to the world. it's not there. or it's gone. or we're just. i don't know. cut off. drifting. yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes no one knows how many years its been anymore it just never ends. please come save us we're in samoa and it's december 30 and yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes and it never ends. it never ends. it never ends.
for the love of god make it end
december 30 december 30 december 30
december 30 december 30 december 30
december 30 december 30 december 30
no one ever dies and it never ends

-

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Scarletdown]

The problem lies within my guitar circuitry. Changing cable type only changes what I pick up.

Right now, I'm getting shortwave Russian radio.

That's nothing. I keep getting these strange 5 notes over and over and over again; purest sounds I have ever heard...

G
A
F
F (octave lower)
C

I wonder if this means something important?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Alsee]

a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics

Or you just wind up 1095.99 gold pieces lighter if you roll above WIS+INT on a d6.

-

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DMUTPeregrine]

That's mostly true. There is a boundary condition where occasional errors will occur, causing "sparklies" as one channel or another gets messed up. Most of the time you'll just see your picture drop out if the signal is bad.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Scarletdown]

I agree. A professional studio should buy the $5 cable instead of the $1 cable.
Perhaps a laboratory should get the $10 cable and an EMP testing facility might pay $20 for additional shielding.
For safety reasons, I'd go for two or possibly even three of those $20 cables in a satelite or space craft.
But that still begs the question; who'd need the $1095 cable?

That would be assorted U.S. government agencies for the $1095 cable. But, they would only buy those during the month of September, right before the Fiscal New Year, in order to avoid being allocated a smaller budget come 01-OCT.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[LynnwoodRooster]

That's about it. It's like most people who buy wine, or buy fancy cars or watches - it's not because they're objectively superior, but people enjoy them, enjoy the differences, and BELIEVE it makes a difference. And when it comes to subjective preference, belief is a HUGE part of what the person will ultimately experience.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[flimflammer]

A review from that $10,000 cable:

I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.

But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.

I don't often find joke reviews funny, but I really did laugh at this one.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[BLKMGK]

Error correction in the signal format shoudl take care of this unless the cable is out of spec....

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[thewolfe]

Open a stereo audiophile magazine, like "The Absolute Sound". You would be amazed at what people pay for speaker wire and interconnects (RCA plugs). I've seen 3 meter interconnects for thousands of dollars. Since so many vendors are advertising the stuff, someone must be buying it. Plus, as expected, there is the cult-like following of customers who "swear" they CAN HEAR the difference between regular copper wire and "XYZ Company" premium speaker wire (that is made out of 'special' copper molecules). And the mag reviewers are always pandering to the merchants by writing glowing reviews.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[anonymov]

Judging food quality is extremely hard, so high prices just might be somewhat justified, but fancy cars and watches are usually bought not for "experience", but as status symbol. I don't think you can show off $1000 audio cables to anyone except fellow audiophiles, others will just think you're an excentric (if you're rich) or an idiot (if you're not).

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

"no its pretty much on or off"

No, no it isn't... Maybe at the conceptual level but in reality, not so much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_diagram

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

When it comes to transmitting analog information, there is a difference in many cables. Even speaker wire (which is analog) makes a difference, depending on quality of copper, gauges used, etc. Most people can't notice the difference, but between "cheap grade" and "good grade" they can. But a HDMI cable is digital. Either the signal is 100% getting there or it isn't. It can't get there "better", like it can with analog information. If a $2 cable transmits the digital signal with no loss, it will sound exactly the same as a $2000 cable, it is impossible to sound "better". Smart people may buy the $20 cable for durability and quality of construction, but can't improve the "sound" of the music like it does with analog. I keep explaining this, and not sure why I would have to so much on a tech website.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[petermgreen]

There is no such thing as a "perfect quality" cable.

Yes some applications do need cables with extremely high specifications and/or extremely long lengths and those cables do cost serious money. but you wouldn't be buying such cables at worst buy or indeed from any supplier that doesn't provide proper datasheets with proper specficiations (not buzzword bingo).

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

spend it, don't keep it to yourself

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the ending, the best part: This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be sometime around 2007 for whomever is reading this. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. Something... happens with them. Something came through, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left. WE LIVE UNDERGROUND! ONLY YOU CAN STOP IT NOW. SAVE US. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. I don't have much time. This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be--

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[CBravo]

If I could get good quality wine for less then I would. However, spending more often does improve quality. And, finally, when I do visit that expensive restaurant they have wine with even better taste.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Pharmboy]

These same people think it is smart to buy a home just to get the tax deductions, so the interest rates don't bother them. And the world IS full of them. They think they understand business and taxes, but they don't. I hear that all the time at work. "So what, it's a tax writeoff" as if that means it is free money.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[BLKMGK]

Yeah, not exactly any incentive for them to try and SAVE money now is there? Dumbest govt. rule I've ever heard of....

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[KMnO4]

A thought about "audiophilia". Men (and some women) love expensive toys. But I think the reason this particular area is so out-of-control is that there's no easily quantifiable metric of "sounds better". Whereas, with something like a Leica camera lens, you can shoot a resolution target yourself and see how well the lens resolves it across the visual field. With fast cars, you can see how fast they go or accelerate. Above a couple thousand, any individual piece of sound reproduction equipment, if properly installed and adjusted, will sounds as good as any other to someone who isn't psychotic. The other funny thing is some moron will pay $1000+ for, let's say, an SPDIF or HMDI cable...but that movie or album was produced with standard commercial equipment and cables from the likes of BSW, Markertek, etc. Wouldn't that make the bits already damaged by inferiority by the time they were mastered for CD or DVD!?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[UncleTogie]

I wonder if this means something important?

Depends. Do you currently find yourself sculpting landscapes with mashed potatoes?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Man On Pink Corner]

Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV.

Rest assured, nobody spends $1000 on a video cable in a production environment unless there is something very unusual about that cable, such as being 100 feet long.

That's the real irony behind high-end audio... do those morons think the stuff they're listening to with their $5000 power cables was recorded that way?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[LynnwoodRooster]

And yet - 99% of the public will laugh at you for buying $90 bottles of wine when three-buck-Chuck is available and tastes nearly as good. The issue is that trying to objectively quantify and place value on an inherently subjective experience is an effort doomed to failure before it begins.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[neonKow]

You go to and pay for a high-end restaurant knowing that you can expect better treatment and ambiance. That is what you pay for. You're might also be paying to treat someone special. This is all well-known and advertised. You aren't JUST paying for better food when you go to a more expensive restaurant, and you aren't paying for a generic "enjoyment."

There is no such equivalent for a $1,000 cable. These are only advertised to transmit bits with great fidelity and to be well constructed. The do not purport to add to the general enjoyment of video, and they certainly don't do anything for the people not paying for it. If BB is serious about the price, they deserve the mocking they get.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[neonKow]

While cool, doesn't this mean only work if you purchase something expensive, and that HAS value?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[neonKow]

Too bad this breaks the mod system a bit. +Karma to posts that miss the point results in mod points that miss the point.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[anonymov]

Uhhh, not quite.

Different kinds of food have different chemical composition which results in different combination of neurons firing etc etc etc.

Different kinds of cables - as long as they do transmit the data faithfully, which doesn't take $1000 cable - result in same signal arriving at the acoustic system receiver.

IOW, $90 bottle of wine and three-buck-Chuck objectively give different experience - what subjective is only whether it is a better experience or not, but $20 cable and $1000 cable give objectively same experience.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well you go right on then, arguing about the objective superiority of your subjective experience then...

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[colinrichardday]

But is the cabling supporting the bridge authentic HDMI?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[anonymov]

Huh? I was not arguing about objective superiority of anything, though I did mention objectively measurable difference.

What you're arguing about is subjective superiority of objectively identical experience. I find that quite silly if you're the one experiencing and borderline fraudulent (depending on strength of your belief in "experience") if you're the one selling.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[MagusSlurpy]

It doesn't take many sales of a $3000 RCA plug to justify a $5000 ad.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[thegarbz]

When it comes to transmitting analog information, there is a difference in many cables. Even speaker wire (which is analog) makes a difference, depending on quality of copper, gauges used, etc.

This is the most incorrect drivel I've ever seen +4 Informative. "Quality of Copper"? People haven't been able to tell the difference between solid silver wire and coathangers in double blind testing.

Audio frequencies are very low in the grand scheme of things. There's no magical design that needs to go into this like say an antenna feeder cable. There's only two things that matter for the analogue side of a hifi. Can you pick up interference, and is the resistance low enough to not impact power transfer?

For the connection between hifi components there is no power transfer. You can use a 36 gauge magnet wire and still get a perfect signal through. The only thing you risk is that you pick up interference (especially in the phono stages of a turntable) by running long cables next to some interference emitter (parallel to power cables). In areas where long cable runs are relevant (think studio / concerts) they use balanced connections to cancel this interference. In the home it's mostly irrelevant.

For the connection between the amp and the speaker you need power transfer. The output impedance of the amp is matched to that of the speaker. Any significant resistance in the cable becomes an issue. That does NOT mean you need a fancy cable, a coat hanger will still do fine here. It just means you need to have a low resistance which can be achieved by simply using a big cable. The lower the characteristic impedance of the speaker the bigger the cable needs to be.

Everything else is just marketing fluff to sell you cables.

Now for digital on the other hand the cable matters a lot. But that is a design issue. Any cable complying with the HDMI spec will work, but that doesn't mean a coat hanger will do the job either.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[GreyWolf3000]

So, I'm guessing you think Tom Hardy camping gear is way awesome.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Klaus_1250]

Error correction does not always fix everything. The bits used for error correction can have errors as well after transmission. And sometimes there can be too many errors in the signal to be fixable with error correction.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables.html

Coat Hangers Sound Better Than Monster Cable

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

But these cables are designed and optimized to be mono-directional.. they HAVE to be better. :)

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did skin effect happen at audio frequencies?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[LynnwoodRooster]

Because emotions, beliefs, and expectations NEVER color any perception, do they? You really don't understand subjective preference do you?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[guruevi]

Because such cables probably don't pass the HDMI test specs. I think the longest certified (passive copper) cable is somewhere near 35-40'. Longer than that and timing issues as well as attenuation of the signal come into play so you may rather choose an optical transfer method (Gefen makes those transponders) but they are a bit more pricey.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[anonymov]

I do believe in expectations changing perception, but charging $980 for subjective emotions and belief while selling something objectively undistinguishable from $20 cable is what I called "borderline fraudulent". You're basically selling autosuggestion, which is achievable much cheaper and much more effective. Why not just close your eyes and imagine you're on live performance, while you're at it?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Will2k_is_here]

Wouldn't it just make more sense to buy a handful of cheap hdmi cables instead of just one pricy one?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

Put a diode on the line?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[unitron]

When you say zero errors in the context of talking about digital...

: - )

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[unitron]

Only after they take out the eSATA guy first!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DarwinSurvivor]

butbutbut, the MASTERING makes it BETTER!!!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[wagnerrp]

DVI/HDMI has no error correction. It sends raw data, so there is no bleeding of errors that you might see in something like DCT compressed video. Red, green, and blue each have their own dedicated data channel, independent of the control channels. A poor cable actually will result in speckling and flaws.

You're thinking of protocols like broadcast television, where there is an amount of redundant data to allow limited recovery, and loss beyond the recovery threshold will rapidly corrupt the entire frame, as well as future back-referenced frames, and a result in a complete lack of ability to decode anything.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[DarwinSurvivor]

0 errors are like pops and clicks, they make it sound better. 1 errors on the other hand...

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[wagnerrp]

That assumes the signal format has error correction, or even error detection to allow rejection of bad data. DVI/HDMI has neither. Bad data on the three dedicated color channels can fuzz out to complete garbage so long as the control channel is error free. If the control channel develops errors, the two devices will drop the link.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[wagnerrp]

This... means something!

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[fyngyrz]

Dude, I hate to tell you, but your ears were shot "back then" too -- it's just that your imagination was working really well.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[doccus]

wow is he serious?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[aaron552]

if you roll above WIS+INT on a d6

That's (in most circumstances) impossible?

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[inviolet]

Uhhh, not quite.

Different kinds of food have different chemical composition which results in different combination of neurons firing etc etc etc.

Different kinds of cables - as long as they do transmit the data faithfully, which doesn't take $1000 cable - result in same signal arriving at the acoustic system receiver.

IOW, $90 bottle of wine and three-buck-Chuck objectively give different experience - what subjective is only whether it is a better experience or not, but $20 cable and $1000 cable give objectively same experience.

You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.

Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Translation Error]

These go to two.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[BLKMGK]

Interesting, I'd heard there was error correction or at least some form of parity to try and recover missing data - like a .PAR file - but it seems with some Googling that it's not as well protected as I'd been led to believe. Thankfully none of my stuff has ever had issues and I've not ever had to do out of spec length runs. If I ever go with a projector though I'll need to do something. There's a system that uses CAT5 cabling that looks good but hardware for each end is expensive :-(

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[jon3k]

Please post a link to a video that demonstrates this please. I've heard people say this before but I've never seen it and I don't know if it's really possible.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[jon3k]

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables.html

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[tchall]

OMG, you're really NOT kidding....

There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.

I know that there's never yet been a successful conversion of an Audiophule to common sense... but FWIW HDMI is "digital" meaning that several paper clips wired between the jacks would carry the signal (1s & 0s) as well as the most expensive piece of highway robbery a crook could get a pigeon to buy...

On the other hand... if you're getting this you'd better plan to include "High Definition" AC cables as well... I can recommend some that are less $2,000 for a six foot power cable... AudioQuest makes their "Hyperlitz" cables for the discerning Audiophule who can hear the difference between 60 cycle and 50 cycle power supplies...

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

The relevant signal is the ones and zeros not the square wave.
Giving a $1000 to a worthy charity says "I'M RICH", giving it to such an obvious con-artist says "I'M AN IDIOT".

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't be arsed to go looking for it, but I read somewhere that in a blind listening test, several audiophiles were incapable of telling the difference in sound from multi-thousand dollar speaker cables and coathanger wire.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JWSmythe]

You, sir, have obviously never tasted the fine watery goodness that is Bling H2O. Be sure to try the "The Ten Thou", for only $2,600.

    For some people, no price is too high, for a HDMI cable, or a bottle of water... They're easily identified by waving their Centurion Card around, and ordering "the best" and "the most expensive" of everything, but for some reason always forgetting to leave a tip.

Re:They may be mocking the price but

[JWSmythe]

    Oh, that's so 2036.... Even my grandparents had that. I think I have an old 5D holoenv box in the garage. Just have your droid come over and pick it up. Be sure you send 15k Earth credits with it. I don't deal in off-world currency.

Misplaced decimal?

[Hatta]

Is this perhaps a $10.95 HDMI cable?

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Pharmboy]

Didn't you read the reviews? One guy was watched a horror movie and it was so realistic, it traumatized him and he had to seek counseling. He couldn't even leave his couch. This is no ordinary $11 cable.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Nimey]

Based on the rather "premium"-sounding description, and that b&m stores typically have an insane markup on their cables, no. I could perhaps believe it being a $109.50 cable, and even the stated price is believable if you take hardcore audiophools into account.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Sponge Bath]

I could see a typo on a single item, but Best Buy offers a complete line of cables from this company, all over $1000.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Sponge Bath]

I forgot to add, these cables qualify for 36 month financing. Bargain!

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not,
@ amazon they have this cable for $1.24 less.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4?linkCode=xm2&tag=invihand-20/
and some more expensive ones too.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Opportunist]

Check the "what customers bought after viewing this item" entry.

I dunno if it's really a selling point if people get to see that they can have twice as much cable for about three tenth of a percent of the price.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also thought this must be some kind of typo but I checked the Audio Quest website which has a price sheet ( http://www.audioquest.com/pdfs/AQ-Retail-PB-2011-NOV-220d.pdf ). On page 15 of the pdf it list the price as $995. It is 100% silver wire but still crazy.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[nurb432]

Its still too much, even at $10.95.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[tgeek]

Nope. Look at the web page, click on the link at the top for HDMI cables, then sort price from highest to lowest. There's a slew of cables in the $500-$1000 price range. At least some of them are rather long -- like 60+ meters -- didn't realize the specs permitted such lengths (but my attention span is far too short to look up the actual limits). Still kinda spendy even with the extended lengths.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[tgeek]

Oops - 60+ FEET not meters. Still awfully long.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[GreatBunzinni]

That, and amazon also sells them for a equally idiotic price.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

In BestBuy's defense at least they provide financing options for your purchase (and free shipping to boot!).

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

High quality passive cables might still work for 60 ft, but they are still in $100 range, not $1000 like they sell. Longer than that you'd want active cables, but for optical they're at ~$400 for 50 ft and ~$5 per each extra foot.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this perhaps a $10.95 HDMI cable?

NO!!! The really sad fact is: Best Buy's price is the real deal!!!!! In fact, it is LOWER than some other audiophile supply stores!!! This company (AudioQuest) really sell this cable at the advertised price. They have taken the Moster Cable business model to the extreme! It's a sad testimony to the fool and his money axiom. "Snake Oil?" Well, at least in the days of the snake oil salesmen, he could only bilk a few suckers at a time. Now, thanks to the internet, the ratio of suckers has increased exponentially.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the "what customers bought after viewing this item" was subject to a take-down notice and isn't available, comrade...

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bondage & Masochism?

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[EdIII]

Was it a Monster(tm) cable?

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the "what customers bought after viewing this item" entry.

I dunno if it's really a selling point if people get to see that they can have twice as much cable for about three tenth of a percent of the price.

What are you, fucking stupid? This cable has a "Dark Gray/Black finish!"

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not Amazon, it's one of their marketplace sellers.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[pburghdoom]

Don't forget the five year warranty...

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Yeah. A long time back I worked at a Best Buy, and it blew my mind to see the inside numbers. Profits on selling a brand new top of the line computer, with a monitor and a printer and everything was just a few bucks. Everybody is competing for cheap computers, so the profit margin is very thin. They buy it for $400, so they have to sell it for $415 or you just go somewhere else. To try to make up the cost of employees and shipping and everything, they charge gigantic margins on other products: mostly cables, printer ink, other cheap accessories. It was almost sickening to find out we only paid about .50 cents for those $12 cables. (not to say anything of the ridiculous MONSTER cables which can be $90 or more). But that is the market.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprising. Partly, that is because people can go online and build a computer for similar low-margin prices, and that's for a full working system, not just pieces with some assembly required. If you go online to buy cables, the shipping will probably cost more than the cable.

Re:Misplaced decimal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice way to advertise! I will do this on my shop next, set a ridiculous price on something and publish it on Slashdot.

The real question is...

[John Bresnahan]

Were they able to deliver all the orders for this item in time for Christmas?

Re:The real question is...

[Opportunist]

It's sold out, don't you even read the summary? :)

Re:The real question is...

[moranar]

Well, since one of the implications of a product being "sold out" is that "somebody bought it", it stands to reason that someone should actually receive what they bought. If they bought it before christmas, a subsequent valid question is to inquire whether they got it in time for the holiday.

Re:The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

woooooosh

Re:The real question is...

[Macrat]

Christmas is 364 days away.

Re:The real question is...

[gorilla_au]

Christmas is 364 days away.

You meant 365? 2012 is a leap year.

Re:The real question is...

[FredFredrickson]

This cable is far superior to present-day televisions. We're talking about Christmas 2018, when the quality of televisions will finally meet this cable.

AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Sycraft-fu]

They aren't the most overprice audiophile garbage cable company, believe it or not, but they are up there. The funniest to me have always been their power cables. They go all the way up to $7000 for a 6-foot IEC-C13 cable (normal computer cable). As though somehow the hundreds or thousands of miles of copper and aluminium cable (the long haul runs are aluminium, cheaper and stronger) are not the problem but the last 6 feet to your device is.

Monster Cable just overcharges you for regular shit. AudioQuest and others like them invent whole new kinds of bullshit and push the prices in to the stratosphere.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Nimey]

Indulge me while I try to get into the headspace of the audiophool who'd buy such a cable.

I'd assume that such a creature would have a dirty great line conditioner plugged into his mains (thus removing the "problem" from the high-voltage lines), and then he'd plug the $7k power cable into the conditioner, and then the device into his overpriced cable, and let his mental condition do the rest.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[gzipped_tar]

I have to believe this is either market segmentation done right, or money laundering done wrong. Or perhaps the other way around.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[slazzy]

Seems like companies overcharging this much for cables are doing the world a favor. This money needs to be extracted from these people before it could be spent where it might do real harm.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

For an audiofool, that's over thinking things. You're supposed to just plug your $7000 power cable into your $150 power outlet, and the job is done.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking along the same lines. Either a fantastic front company, or someone's selling cables to our government. You know how it is, when the taxpayer's are paying, money is no object!

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Shysters have been around for a very long time. "A fool and his money are soon parted." Actually, the phenomenon is probably older than money (in the usual modern sense of the word "money"), so perhaps we should rephrase it to something more general, like "A fool and his valuables are soon parted." Anti-fraud and truth-in-advertising laws can place some limits, which can really help in cases of marginal foolishness, but there are always going to be some people who are so dumb that you don't actually have to say anything technically untrue to get them to hand over their money for no good reason, and there's really a limit to what you can do to protect such people, especially in a modern liberal free society wherein simply appointing a smarter person to make all their financial decisions for them is typically viewed as an infringement on their personal liberty. We do still do that in extreme cases of severe mental incompetence, but people who can dress themselves and count change are usually allowed to make their own financial choices, even if they consistently make bad ones. Well, so, sometimes they're going to make bad ones.

Of course, only an unscrupulous person would *deliberately* take outlandish advantage of such people in this manner, but if you think it's possible to rid society of unscrupulous persons... you might want to consider hiring someone smarter to make your financial decisions for you. (I only know of one way to rid the earth of unscrupulous persons: make the planet uninhabitable.)

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

And a mere $8,450.00 for a speaker cable (it is well worth it according to the reviews on Amazon):
http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-K2-terminated-speaker-cable/dp/B000J36XR2/ref=sr_1_2
Have a look at the "customer images" as well.

HDMI cable with "reviews":
http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connection/dp/B003CT2A6I/ref=sr_1_3

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Slightly OT, but Aluminum is used because its a better conductor per unit weight than copper, and the cheaper price. Conductivity Al is pretty soft, but then the cores are high tensile steel and are the load bearing elements of over head wires. Due to the skin effect and steels poor conductivity, almost no current travels in the cores.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[aardvarkjoe]

Don't forget your $60 anti-vibration ebony outlet cover, or that $150 power outlet won't do you any good.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the core steel doesn't fatigue like Aluminium would...
With the really voltages involved, there's (relatively) very little
current involved, too.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we should get together and make some new HDMI cables. I figure if we put steel braid in the middle, aluminum outside that, gold plate everything, put the rubber from some exotic african rain forest tree around that and blow nitrogen down the line before we terminate it... that's a $60,000 6ft cable. $80k for the one blessed by a legit voodoo priest to keep the bad spirits out of the line.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the last six feet, it's the middle 12 feet. Changes everything,

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Matheus]

That would depend a lot on whether they do a lot of cash transactions... profitable money laundering is wonderful: you set up company that sells crap for mucho-dinero then have your 'people' buy a lot of the product with the cash you are trying to cleanse. You make the price high enough to not have to perform an exorbitant number of transactions but low enough that it stays off your average regulator's radar. The random idiots who actually buy your product for real are the ones really paying for the cost of the crap you sell. If you get enough idiots you make even more money and it's clean from the start!

There's a Pizza chain in Minneapolis that started it's life as a funnel for coke money. The crazy thing was they made *really good pizza. SO at some point they started raking in so much dough (no pun intended) from the 'za that they no longer needed the stress of the coke business and went legit. (well... I'm not so naive as to say *completely legit but... you get the idea)

Capitalism.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[QuarkofNature]

A few years ago I went to an audiophile gathering (meatspace meeting for members of an audiophile forum) for kicks. I held back a chuckle when someone showed me the $1000+ power cable for their hand-made tube amplifier for their $4K Sony MDR-R10 headphones. I specifically asked this question, assuming a full-active sine-generating UPS behind it. But no, the power cable owner stated he was specifically told by the manufacturer that the cables worked best directly plugged into the wall, without any surge protector, UPS, or other devices to "color" the sound.

So yes, pure, unadulterated bunk. Sometimes the big lies work best... a $50 cable might be just overpriced, but a $1000 cable...well, there has to be SOMETHING to it, right?

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Darinbob]

Their headspace is so tiny that it'd be an uncomfortable fit if you tried to get into it.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Slightly OT, but Aluminum is used because its a better conductor per unit weight than copper, and the cheaper price. Conductivity Al is pretty soft, but then the cores are high tensile steel and are the load bearing elements of over head wires. Due to the skin effect and steels poor conductivity, almost no current travels in the cores.

Aluminum is NOT a better conductor. Copper resistivity is 16.78 Ohm-meter, Aluminum is more than 28.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

did you miss the part about "per unit weight"? it weighs a lot less than copper.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[petermgreen]

Aluminum is NOT a better conductor.

It really depends on your definition of better. In particular which parameter are you trying to minimise. Lets assume that a designer has a maximum acceptable resistance from their design calculations. Three things they might might be trying to minimise, cross sectional area, mass or cost.

Copper resistivity is 16.78 Ohm-meter, Aluminum is more than 28.

Your figures are nonsensically (10^9 times larger than the figures on wikipedia) but aluminium does have a higher resistivity than copper. However it also has a lower density and a lower cost per tonne.

Note: in the calculations below R is resistance, p is resistivity, A is cross sectional area, L is length, V is volume, d is density amd M is mass.

Let us consider a cable 1 kilometer long and with a resistance of 1 ohm (not an unreasonable design requirement IMO). First let us consider what it's cross sectional area would need to be.
R=p(l/A)
A=p(l/R)
For copper
A=16.78*10^-9*(10^3/1)=16.78*10^-6 square meters (16.78 square millimeters)
For aluminium
A=28.2*10^-9*(10^3/1)=28.2*10^-6 square meters (28.2 square millimeters)

So the copper cable has a smaller CSA. Now lets figure out it's volume
V=Al
For copper
V=16.78*10^-6*10^3=16.78*10^-3 cubic meters
For aluminimum
V=28.2*10^-6*10^3=28.2*10^-3 cubic meters
Now for it's mass
M=Vd
For copper
M=16.78*10^-3*8.94*10^3=150 kilograms
For aluminium
M=28.2*10^-3*2.70*10^3=76.1 kilograms

So the alumimum cable is just over half the weight of the copper cable.

Add to that the price per ton for copper being over three times higher than the price per ton of aluminium and the aluminium cable is likely to be far cheaper (plastics cost and armouring costs will be a little higher for the copper cable but afaict this is not significant overall).

So the copper cable is smaller but the aluminium is half the weight and far cheaper. Which is "better" depends on your design priorities.

Aluminium is not used much in building wiring despite it's lower cost and lower weight. Afaict the main reason for this is that it needs special termination practices to avoid terminations failing (and often getting dangerously hot in the process). This isn't too much of a problem in an aircraft or a distribution network where you can enforce proper termination practices but it's a big problem in building wiring which is rarely under tight control.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Is there a list of all this stuff somewhere?

2. I could sell an ebony outlet cover profitably for way less than $60. Maybe I could become the Monoprice.com of woo: "why spend $1,009.50 on some over-hyped HDMI cable. You can get the same quality here for only $900". I would just have to come up with some argument that hype dirties the signal.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[anonymov]

Nah, just poke around those sites and audiophile forums. There are lots of hilarious stuff, like "CD finalizer toolkit", which was a device you put your CDs in and it worked it over with special light to make pits more pronounced, which really brought out the nuances in sound.

Re:AudioQuest has been at this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, when you try to connect aluminum to copper and they undergo heat-related expansion/contraction cycles, they do so at a different rate. Which loosens up the connection over time. Newer aluminum wire sometimes is an alloy with other metals added in to make it behave more similar to copper in extraction/contraction.

There's also the fun oxidation of Aluminum (connections need to be treated with an anti-oxidation agent). The oxide of Aluminum is an insulator, driving up the resistance of the connection, causing heat. Copper oxide doesn't have the same issue.

Does this cable come with lube...

[Type44Q]

...or does it reach out with a rough, calloused hand?

Re:Does this cable come with lube...

[Anonymous Coward]

It comes with a illustrated manual written by the guy who designed the goatse.cx website.

Re:Does this cable come with lube...

[Anonymous Coward]

That optimized HD polyethylene composition will provide the extra pleasure.

Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[plate_o_shrimp]

Best Buy are punters. Here's a REAL cable:
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[erroneus]

You sir, have opened my eyes. I used to think "Monster Cables" was out of control with their ridiculous prices.

What I really want to know is WHO Is buying at that price?! And at that price what kind of support will they offer? On-site installation? "Hello, have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf is a "punter?" Other than a kicker in the NFL...

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[RicardoGCE]

British slang for "sucker", though it's also commonly used to refer to the average patron at a business.

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[hedronist]

What is even more special is the list of "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" products.

Now I have to get a towel and clean the coffee off my monitor.

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[Kwpolska]

I suggest buying the towel from Denon themselves. Normally, it'd cost $100, but for every customer whose last name ends in a 'q', they offer you a deal: -1% off. Or, if your name and surname have got a total of exactly ^ characters, you get it for free.

Re:Hah! Get a REAL cable!

[rts008]

I made the mistake of trying to read some of the reviews for that cable...still giggling.
Here's a typical review:

1,688 of 1,714 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Great cable, but too fast., June 23, 2008
By
Matthew Sidor "seadour" (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable (Electronics)
Transmission of music data at rates faster than the speed of light seemed convenient, until I realized I was hearing the music before I actually wanted to play it. Apparently Denon forgot how accustomed most of us are to unidirectional time and the general laws of physics. I tried to get used to this effect but hearing songs play before I even realized I was in the mood for them just really screwed up my preconceptions of choice and free will. I'm still having a major existential hangover.

Would not purchase again.

[emphasis mine]

Except this isn't pro cable

[Sycraft-fu]

And pro cable doesn't cost that much. The only example of pro quality HDMI cable I know of (remember HDMI is a consumer spec, pros use HD-SDI) is from Belden, sold by Bluejeans cable. It is honestly above and beyond normal cable in that you get more range out of lower gauge wire on account of the tighter tolerances it is built to. We've used it at work for runs that are out of spec since it is cheaper than getting active equalizers.

For all that it is still only $20 for a 3 foot run, and then about $3/foot after that. Not cheap, but still way less than this shit.

Remember with digital signaling there is NO room for any of the voodoo audiophiles like to claim. You can either measure the improvement on a scope or it isn't there. The signal must meet certain specs to work properly and those are easy to measure. So unless they can show better certification ranges, it is bullshit.

Also at 3 feet you don't need anything special. It is such a short distance even regular old cheap Monoprice 28AWG HDMI cable performs flawlessly at high resolutions. It is only with distance that you start to need better tolerances to get the signal through properly. Even then if it gets too far you just convert to fiber, cheaper than trying to build the world's most perfect copper cable.

Re:Except this isn't pro cable

[__aajfby9338]

Remember with digital signaling there is NO room for any of the voodoo audiophiles like to claim. You can either measure the improvement on a scope or it isn't there.

That's never slowed down the audiophiles before. I have a friend who insists that degaussing his CDs improves the sound in some manner that I'm unable to hear because of my "tin ears". He also once described to me the importance of breaking in his audio system's power cables by passing a current through them for a while before use, and the importance of using audio-grade circuit breakers in his house's load center.

Re:Except this isn't pro cable

[bill_mcgonigle]

sold by Bluejeans cable. It is honestly above and beyond normal cable in that you get more range out of lower gauge wire on account of the tighter tolerances it is built to. We've used it at work for runs that are out of spec since it is cheaper than getting active equalizers.

I've had similar experience with their cables being able to make long runs where others peter out (RG-6) in my case. Good cables, good company.

Amazon sells them cheaper!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon is selling it for $1.24 cheaper! Whoo!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4

Re:Amazon sells them cheaper!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon is selling it for $1.24 cheaper! Whoo! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4

Chucking at further below that Amazon page where it says:

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

HDMI Cable 2M (6 Feet)
$3.05

Re:Amazon sells them cheaper!

[RDW]

Amazon is selling it for $1.24 cheaper! Whoo!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4

It may look like a bargain, but check your setup first. I was about to order one, but unfortunately at 3.28 ft it was slightly too short for connecting my HD-DVD player, which is 3.29 ft away from my TV (I've found I get perceptible jitter if I place it any closer, probably due to an excess of events in the 124-126 GeV range). Luckily Amazon sells a longer cable that is already getting good reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connection/dp/B003CT2A6I

At $2,694.75 it's a little on the pricey side, but I'm viewing this as a long-term investment like the player itself.

Re:Amazon sells them cheaper!

[Alsee]

Apparently some people decided the 3.3 ft cable wouldn't be long enough.

-

Re:Amazon sells them cheaper!

[game kid]

(I've found I get perceptible jitter if I place it any closer, probably due to an excess of events in the 124-126 GeV range)

I told those Swiss dudes to stop messing around with those damn bosons but they don't listen. My apologies on their future behalf.

Re:Amazon sells them cheaper!

[Anonymous Coward]

And what's more, they actually have 5 of them in STOCK!

well sir that is our top of line cable but for$100

[Joe_Dragon]

you can get a monster cable or for $250 we give you a Geek Squad Black Tie Protection and it comes with a free $50 monster cable.

Never mind the quality its the cables length !

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine was only only too short at one end.

It's an heirloom, not e-waste

[retroworks]

I bought 20 of them. It will probably beat my mutual retirement fund, if the recent past is any indicator.

Re:It's an heirloom, not e-waste

[Barny]

... Damn, good call.

Analog

[jones_supa]

Regarding analog cables, I've found that the OEM "there ya go" cables included with LCDs and set-top-boxes have usually bested the more robust looking cables that I've bought separately.

Re:Analog

[Bing Tsher E]

The OEM bundled cables need to be high quality because the vendors don't want an incidental accessory to cause a customer service call or return. And said OEMs have sharp purchasing people involved in selecting the bundled accessories. Whereas, the retail outlets selling accessories only need to ''stand behind" the cable itself, and a 'return' for them is an opportunity to get you into the store again to buy more 'stuff.'

Anyone stupid enough to pay this much for...

[sydbarrett74]

...an HDMI cable deserves to be ripped off.

Re:Anyone stupid enough to pay this much for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eef thee good Lor' didn' wan'em sheared, he wouldn'a made 'em sheep!
--Eli Wallach, The Magnificent Seven

Re:Anyone stupid enough to pay this much for...

[Twinbee]

Yes, but at best, that's balanced by the evil scum companies having that money instead.

Re:Anyone stupid enough to pay this much for...

[DriedClexler]

Score: -1, Social Darwinism

Absurdity Squared

[Lord Grey]

Ah, the electronic version of the infamous Mountain Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. Not the price, but the reviews.

It's nice to see people working together like that.

Re:Absurdity Squared

[Phat_Tony]

I can't believe I didn't see a link in this thread to the mother of all absurd cable review threads.

Re:Absurdity Squared

[EdIII]

This needs to be put up here. I still can't stop laughing.

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

Re:Absurdity Squared

[Oswald]

Thank you for that, good sir. In case you have missed it, I present, in return, this product review for a gallon of milk in the form of a parody of Poe's The Raven.

Re:Absurdity Squared

[beowulfcluster]

How about this review for a box of uranium ore? http://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM/ref=pd_sbs_a_4

I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.

Must have been uranium-238 but it doesn't say so on the box.

No, often not

[Sycraft-fu]

One of the things many audiophiles are up on is that "less is more". Basically that the less you have in your signal chain, the better the results. Now never mind power isn't in the signal chain, they apply the same logic there. You don't want all sorts of "bad" circuitry on your power and all that shit.

You actually find some audiophile devices are worse sounding for it. As an example you'll find DACs that are finicky as hell with regards to input because they don't do a good job locking to the signal and then don't reclock it to their own source.

It is a world based on voodoo, not on fact. None of them like real testing, they like listening with their wallet.

Re:No, often not

[mcgrew]

Audiophiles have been in a quandary ever since the CD came out. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better the gear sounded*. Nobody needed "golden ears" to hear the difference between a $50 turntable, a $100 turntable, and a $500 turntable.

Not so with digital audio. Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.

You guys all know (at least I hope you do) that a $2 digital cable works just as well as a $2000 digital cable; noise only affects an analog signal. Costly RCA cables and speaker cables may be worth it if you have more dollars than sense, but you're better off spending that cash on expensive booze or better, giving it to charity.

*With the exception of fools who bought into quadraphonics: a $700 stereo sounded far better than a $1000 quad setup, since you needed two of everything for quad.

Re:No, often not

[vlm]

Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.

You're generally speaking correct, but more correct if you're exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel. Cut off at $2.50 and you're good. $0.25 is like trying to use a 70s era lm741 as your preamp, with a lm386 as speaker driver.

It still boggles the mind that in 2011 there are "home hobbiest" types using LM386 chips as an audio amp, they're nice and cheap like your 25 cents but they whoosh out white noise into headphones like a trip to a seashore. There's better lower noise stuff so you don't have to hear a constant "ssssh" in your headphones, but thats more like $2.50 not $100. Also the lm386 is a great oscillator as the power voltage sags, like when batteries are getting weak, when the bass response starts sounding whacky you know you should have selected a chip designed after 1980.

Also your $.25 DAC is gonna be like half a really dirt cheap dual DAC and you're going to be lucky to get 40 dB cross channel separation and noise performance is going to be audibly foul, which I suppose is better than most normal humans can hear, although its pretty pitiful as a spec. Again, $2.50 instead of $.25 and you're back into territory where you probably don't have the gear to measure it, much less hear it.

Another classic "cheapie" characteristic is 3rd ord IMD products. You can hear those in heavy bass and I'm no audiophool type. Again, the $2.50 DAC and a $2.50 amp chip designed this century would eliminate the heard and measurable effect.

The market seems to be "$0.25 junk at walmart" or the audiophool class. Not much in between. Although I must say my ipod nano final audio amp is pretty decent with low noise, but some would say i-device = audiophool, well ... whatever.

The standard /. car analogy is modern cars are more reliable than old cars, if you exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel like a yugo or a trabant or whatever China Motors is starting to ship.

Re:No, often not

[bill_mcgonigle]

You guys all know (at least I hope you do) that a $2 digital cable works just as well as a $2000 digital cable

I saw this kind of talk in TFS as well ... the reason the $2 cable is fine is because there's no such thing as a 'digital cable'. All signaling is analog and digital protocols/encodings ensure lossless data transfer (or are used with codecs that can handle loss).

Re:No, often not

[Khyber]

"Now never mind power isn't in the signal chain"

60Hz power hum from shit-grounding is in fact the one and only thing audiophools are correct on. Power can be the issue in the signal chain.

Re:No, often not

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just point out that the word is "hobbyist", as in "someone who indulges in hobbies"?

Not "hobbiest", which would mean "the most hobby", which doesn't make any sense.

Thank you.

Re:No, often not

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I'd chastise you for being an anal retentive prick, injecting holier-than-thou grammatical corrections where we're successfully communicating ideas, annoying everyone by flagging trivial errors made in an informal setting.

But that one was actually useful. Just don't let it go to your head.

Re:No, often not

[vlm]

I should follow up, that there is a time and place for twenty five cent parts. Like kids noisy toys. Or repairing circuit designs from 1980 with identical parts.
Thats why you're seeing, basically, ancient junk, being sold by otherwise respectable resellers at those prices.
But don't think that ancient junk is appropriate for new designs.

Re:No, often not

[dns_server]

I believe HDMI is designed to not work and reset if there are any errors in sending the signal.
It is designed by paranoid media companies and is suppose to be able to detect if someone is trying to listen in on the signals.
In practice people have found the keys for hdmi and have developed hardware to decrypt and rip the signal so this has not worked out.

When i have wiggled a hdmi cable it has stops broadcasting video for a few seconds so i would expect a bad cable to not work and be easily spotted so just buy a few $3 cables in case they fail.

Re:No, often not

[mcgrew]

By "digital cable" and "analog cable" I'm referring to the signal going through the cable rather than the cable itself. A cable ending with RCA jacks generally doesn't send a digital signal, and an HDMI cable doesn't carry an analog signal. Of course an HDMI cable could carry an analog signal, but it's still a digital cabe, as transmitting bits was what it was designed for.

Re:No, often not

[Idbar]

You can improve any component with your design. Many amplifiers have noise die to swings that can be filtered or reduced using feedback. Others with problems in the low frequencies can be fixed with an array of capacitors that can provide de "boost", when your maximums are exceed. As someone that enjoy playing with amplifiers, a proper design that accounts for many of the flaws of the components is normally what you look for... You may do it your self for cheap, if you go around solving the problems, but you can also buy a piece of hardware that is good enough for your taste. But it is all in the design of your decoding/amplifying stages.

Re:No, often not

[FredFredrickson]

Well most cables are good enough in the $2 range, but I wanted to chime in that coax and optical audio is passive and unidirectional, so there is no parity checks. If the receiving clock isn't right, there can be jitter. That's not usually a problem with the cable, but it can be. (Unlike TCP/IP which resends bits if stuff goes missing)

Monster Cable HDMI

[Anonymous Coward]

Monster Cable have a video explaining the benefit of their super HDMI technology cable.

http://www.monstercable.com/hdmi/hdmi.asp

So I'm still considering between AudioQuest and Monster Cable for my super HD experience!

It pales in comparison

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

It pales in comparison to the reviews for this product:

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable

Re:It pales in comparison

[ColdWetDog]

It pales in comparison to the reviews for this product:

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable

What Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

Accoutrements Horse Head Mask

??????

Re:It pales in comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get a horse mask
2. Get a dozen of cheap HDMI cables
3. Go chase Monster Cables and AudioQuest CEOs with a HDMI whip while wearing the mask.

Re:It pales in comparison

[SleazyRidr]

I'm almost inclined to buy myself a horse head mask, just to keep that link up there.

Old news..

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at bby nearly 9 months and when we were slow we would log in the bby website and laugh at the absurd prices. The reviews were entertaining.

Follow the money

[gzipped_tar]

The conspiracy theorist in me always believe this kind of outrageous prices are part of some money laundering schemes. Maybe their malice is so well advanced that it cannot be distinguished from stupidity already.

Re:Follow the money

[dargaud]

Where are mod points when you need them...

Not a typo???

[seven of five]

The 5-meter cable is $2700 at Amazon. WTF????????

Re:Not a typo???

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I thought this was a joke, but now I realize the joke is really on the consumer now.

Its open season for m$ bashing too

[phonewebcam]

Not much cheer for them over in the comments section of The Registers story of the Galaxy S II outselling the Lumia 100 to 1. It would be terrible if anyone were to see this as a way to get back at them is some small way for the $5 per Android handset they extort, head over their and join in.

Buncha pussies

[rickb928]

I mock the $39.99 HDMI cables. The $3.99 set from Fry's works absolutely fine. Cox cable compresses the strwam so badly anyways that the DVR records massive artifacts and decode errors regularly.

This is an old, old debate - digital cables. Maybe if you have terrible cable that so distorts the waveform you are getting more like sine wave than square wave (and there is no reason to assume that HDMI signalling is actually square wave, though it can be, no harm done) you are still able to rely on accurate clocking and decoding the data. The most likely errors would be caused by issues that come and go at close multiples of the clock. So what sort of cable issue would you expect to have that occurs at GHz rates? I thought so. Not bending it, and actually not external interference. Shielding aside, I would expect HDMI to use differential signalling, and I admit I've never bothered to look at the spec. It just makes sense. This renders external interference much less (no, not 0) of a problem.

HDMI is expensive for two reasons - licensing and marketing. Just count me out of wanting a 6 foot $30 HDMI cable.

And having said that, I have a lot of Monster cable. Speaker cables, where for my setup having heavy gauge cables is good, stereo signal cables where actual gold and not just flash has served me well for almost 15 years, flat coax for under the carpet, and the thinnest coax I can find in RG59, easy to fish and easy to retrieve. I don't much care for the oxygen-free copper thing, but when one of my signal cables starts failing I'll cut it open and see. I've seen the inside of some mic cables where the copper is noticably corroded, and the Belden guys claimed it was due to poor quality copper and contamination in manufacturing, which takes a decade or more to advance to the point of a problem.

So tell me, are you similarly outraged by 3D HD?

Re:Buncha pussies

[thegarbz]

Maybe if you have terrible cable that so distorts the waveform you are getting more like sine wave than square wave

If you've seen some of the things that pass for a "signal" in the high speed / digital RF world you'll realise people would go mental if they ever got something as decent as a sinewave down their cables.

Re:Buncha pussies

[rickb928]

I've seen what can be done in the Ku band. Yep, it takes some engineering to make this stuff work.

Re:Buncha pussies

[tangent]

True. See the oscillograms in the eye diagram article on Wikipedia to get an idea of what happens to the signal at the speeds HDMI runs at.

A perfect square wave requires infinite bandwidth to reproduce. In practice, you want at least 5x the bandwidth of your fundamental frequency, and 10x is better, so that you get enough of the harmonics to approximate a true square wave.

I seem to recall that HDMI is currently running at up to 2 GHz, so HDMI would require 10-20 GHz cable drivers if the goal were to produce square waves. Somehow I don't think the $60 Bluray player I just bought for Christmas has a high-end microwave transmitter built into it.

Re: voodoo audiophiles like to claim

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember with digital signaling there is NO room for any of the voodoo audiophiles like to claim. You can either measure the improvement on a scope or it isn't there.

Well actually there isn't any room for voodoo with analog signalling either, and you can either measure differences in analog signal quality on a scope or it isn't there too.

Actually a steal,

[Anonymous Coward]

in comparison to this 10k Ethernet cable

But then again it's made of "high-purity copper":

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM

$23 million dollar book on Amazon

[Quantum_Infinity]

If Amazon can sell a book for $23 million, what's wrong with Best Buy selling a $1000 HDMI cable?

disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you should really get a life

3 wolves T-shirt

[koan]

Nothing beats Amazons 3 wolves T-shirt reviews.
http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Short-Sleeve-Black/dp/B000NZW3KC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324914078&sr=8-1

Audiophile

[JBMcB]

We're talking about people who think you need the fastest computer available to play ripped CD audio out of your computer, because slower computers create "jitter" in the audio output, degrading the signal quality.

That's right, your lowly mid-range computer, capable of pushing gigabits of data per second across it's internal bus, isn't capable of reliably feeding your audio buffer with a of megabit of audio data per second. 'Cause, you know, your computer is busy doing so much other stuff, like updating the clock, and checking for updates.

Re:Audiophile

[Anonymous Coward]

Except almost no one actually believes this. You're confusing audiophiles with complete retards. Real audiophiles care about stuff that matters, not 320kbps vs FLAC or Monster cables.

Re:Audiophile

[JBMcB]

I read it in an article in Stereophile. From their "computer audio expert" guy. It's also a popular belief in the forums.

Poking fun at the AudioQuest price sheet!

[davidwr]

Don't blame Best Buy, $1095 is MSRP.

From the AudioQuest November 1 Retail Price Book:

An unavoidable fact-of-life: Every component and cable in a system causes some amount of distortion. These aberrations add up, like layers of foggy glass between you and the image.
The goal of high quality components and cables is to be like clean clear panes of glass, altering and distorting the
information as little as possible."

And one goal of digital transmission is to allow automatic correction of small analog signal errors (0V=0, 5V=1, 0.1V is also 0, 4.9V is also 1).

Quote #2:

Will [USB and HDMI] finally be the âoebits-are-bitsâ uncorruptable digital data weâ(TM)ve been promised over and over? Nope!

It does if all components are in spec.

Quote #3:

However, not only is there a surprising amount of variation among cables, but also in the capability of the hardwareâ(TM)s input and output electronics.

Fair enough. But either this is intentional, such as a device that is rated at a lower spec, or it is is equipment that is no longer working within specifications. If you really care about your audio and video, fix your faulty equipment. Putting a "nearly-analog-perfect" cable in the system may help but it's only a band-aid.

A digital cable that costs 100-200 times same-HDMI-standard-spec same-length cable in the local hardware store is only good for a few things:

* Getting a good laugh.
* Proving that the owner can burn $100 bills 10 at a time for what might be a status symbol. Note: Only applies to high-net-worth individuals.
* Proving P. T. Barnum was right. Applies to non-high-net-worth individuals who only think they are rich.
* Playing the role of the super-expensive wine on the wine list that is almost never ordered, to make your ordinary ridiculously-priced cables *cough*Monster(R)*cough* look downright reasonable.

Re:Poking fun at the AudioQuest price sheet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh, nice. A shooting gallery. I'll join :)

Every component and cable in a system causes some amount of distortion

How is that a fact of life? Besides, noise does not necessarily translate into distortion.

These aberrations add up, like layers of foggy glass between you and the image.

No they don't. By definition noise is an ergodic process, which means that you can't simply add up the different noise sources and have a meaningful indication for the total system noise (at the very least, you'd need a sum-of-squares approximation).

Will [USB and HDMI] finally be the "bits-are-bits" uncorruptable digital data we've been promised over and over? Nope!

Oh, boy. Do they spout the same crap about SATA, TCP and their own website?

However, not only is there a surprising amount of variation among cables, but also in the capability of the hardware's input and output electronics

Interesting. How does this is any way affect the necessity of higher quality wiring?

close

[rubycodez]

foremost it's British slang for a whore's (oh, excuse me, Sex Worker's) customer, what we'd call a "John" in the U.S. the "sucker" use comes from someone who's getting fucked over....

Re:close

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. I figured it was British and was mostly trolling, but appreciate the answer :-)

Re:close

[Barny]

No, no it's not.

It CAN be used to mean that, but in general, it means a gambler or a customer.

Re:close

[rubycodez]

gambler yes, meaning of customer in general came later

Re:close

[colinrichardday]

the "sucker" use comes from someone who's getting fucked over....

Isn't that the point of hiring a sex worker?

Every store should have a version of this

[gstrickler]

After all, anyone who buys one clearly has more money than sense, and therefore, should be separated from their money. It has been foretold "a fool and his money are soon parted", who are we to interfere with such a prophecy?

that's because Best Buy is the new Wal-Mart

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect, people commenting on that magnificent cable are Best Buy customers. Mocking, sure, they are all trash!

crap quality anyway

[amoeba1911]

My media center computers have an HDMI output as well as DVI and DE15 (VGA). My TV has HDMI and VGA inputs. I have to say, the DE15 looks a lot better than the HDMI. So I use the VGA port exclusively now, it may be over two decades old but it still has the sharpest image quality.

Can anyone explain to me why VGA looks better than HDMI? I've tried this with several computers and a few different TVs. It would seem to me HDMI is inferior, why are they pushing an inferior standard?

Re:crap quality anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

God, what an idiot. You really believe your lower resolution, analog VGA is better that the higher resolution, digital HDMI? You are an imbecile, aren't you?

Re:crap quality anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an FYI, but that 'VGA' connection handled resolutions higher than 'HD' TV signals back in the day. 1920x1080 is pocket change compared to what I could send out of my cheap as hell, home-built, Pentium-era PC with an 8MB video card, all on that analog 'VGA' connection.

Re:crap quality anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you are not running on native resolution. Set your resolution to native screen display and set it to Scan Only (not overscan or whatever some TVs do by default).

HDMI is DVI with sound in one cable.

Re:crap quality anyway

[puetzk]

ACK. The highest standard mode I know of on ye olde D-sub is QXGA (2048Ã--1536px) @85Hz, which is about 4x the data rate of 1080p @30fps.

I even had a monitor that could run it... took pretty spendy cables though :-)

one of the problems with this cable is

[GarryFre]

Thieves have been breaking in in stealing the cable replacing it with the cheap ones from grocery outlet. Owners can't tell the difference in video quality at all until its too late and then the cable is long gone. Also they don't have serial numbers on them so please can't recover them. It's such a travesty. Prudent buyer should insure it each and every 1 of these cables. My gump said that's all I gotta say about that.

Re:one of the problems with this cable is

[Anonymous Coward]

Thieves have been breaking in in stealing the cable replacing it with the cheap ones from grocery outlet.

The only thing I don't understand is why a thief would think that's a good trade.

Implied design requirement: Status symbol

[davidwr]

when the design requirement is to deliver groceries from point A to point B in style.

There, fixed that for you.

Seriously though, the "technical rationalization" people audiophiles use to get undetectable or even totally-absent improvements is because they dare not say "I'm buying a status symbol" or "I'm buying this to prove to my friends that I have money to burn."

Best buy customers are idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, if you buy any home theater gear there and listen to the no education morons they have on staff then you are a complete idiot.

They caret to the morons of the world. People who have any IQ will buy their stuff from dealers that are honest and deliver a superior product. Not the low grade dog food they sell at Best Buy.

Re:Best buy customers are idiots...

[Scarletdown]

Honestly, if you buy any home theater gear there and listen to the no education morons they have on staff then you are a complete idiot.

They caret to the morons of the world. People who have any IQ will buy their stuff from dealers that are honest and deliver a superior product. Not the low grade dog food they sell at Best Buy.

So this is what former Circuit City employees are doing with their free time, post AC on Slashdot? Surely you have better things to do than go spewing insults at anyone who might buy something at Best Buy?

Not so fast

[davidwr]

Your analog scope has a small amount of error in the signal it shows.

If your speakers and your ears are (combined) more accurate than your scope, you may be able to hear things that the scope won't measure.

In the digital world this won't matter of course. If you ears are "perfect" they will hear the inherent digital distortion and/or inherent speaker-system characteristics that come from converting the 100%-accurately-transmitted digital signal to an analog sound at the speaker or speaker-driver-circuit. No amount of "making the digital signal cleaner" will change what the hypothetical perfect human ear would hear.

Thankfully, no human ear is perfect and digital sound is "good enough" to fool almost every human ear. Likewise, any decent analog scope is going to out-measure the human ear by far.

Re:Not so fast

[Khyber]

A regular single-wave oscilloscope is not as good at one thing - stringed instruments.

I pick up/hear odd nuances that an analog scope won't show/pick up, but my digital 'tuner' program will easily show (as it renders the multiple waveforms it detects coming from the signal and very accurately reproduces them all on a graph so I know if I'm actually hearing what I think I'm hearing or not.)

APTuner FTW.

Re:Not so fast

[neonKow]

Yeah, this is not true.

A perfect human ear still has a range of sounds it can hear, and it still has a threshold where a sound is too quiet to hear and steps in volume that it can't distinguish between. There is a point where a digital signal contains all the information a human ear can perceive, and it's not actually that much by today's standards. A perfect human ear is not an alien ear.

And your statement about the scope is not correct either. A good analog scope won't have an error that matters to our ears because of physiological limits. It would be like claiming if our eyes were perfect we could see molecules and electrons: it's simply not true.

Check out their price list PDF

[jonabbey]

The first page of AudioQuest's North America November 2011 pricelist has a beautiful painting of a bunch of wolves staring right at you. A bit on the nose metaphor for AudioQuest's intent to wear you down and consume every last dollar on your carcass.

This company has to be a put-on, right? "Air-Tube Dielectric"?

Really!

[Greyfox]

Why, I once transmitted a TWO over this cable and it WORKED GREAT!

Re:Really!

[Krau Ming]

so is that HDMI 2.0 then? i didn't think that was out yet...

Re:Really!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me when you get to ELEVEN.

Re:Really!

[Mikachu]

What are you talking about? There's no such thing as two.

Re:Really!

[Ihmhi]

Oh... oh god.

All I have to do now is write a piece of software that converts 1s and 0s into 2s and 1s (respectively). I can call it the "Executive Elite Processing Unit" and charge $500 a pop.

I think I love you.

Re:Really!

[fbjon]

I'm thinking this kind of mocking actually just increases their sales, judging by the quality displayed in this thread that I randomly found by searching for the manufacturer in question. After reading that, in case everyone here aren't already furiously headdesking, here's a quote from the main page: "I'm not a big fan of blind listening tests."

Re:Really!

[d.the.duck]

I'm sure the commenter meant 10

Re:Really!

[kmoser]

HDMI cables don't go to 11, so you can't watch Spinal Tap on them.

Re:Really!

[tunapez]

These go to 01011.

Re:Really!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

But at least it includes...

[Anonymous Coward]

... free shipping!!!

Might go in and buy one just to watch the clerk crap his "no-commission" pants.

And then return it. ;)

Re: voodoo audiophiles like to claim

[bill_mcgonigle]

Well actually there isn't any room for voodoo with analog signalling either, and you can either measure differences in analog signal quality on a scope or it isn't there too.

Perhaps not voodoo, but there's plenty of variability in analog. Each component modifies the waveform in some fashion (for better or worse). With digital the idea is to get the unmodified bits from point-A to point-B in whatever way works (and at the signaling level there's plenty of loss/attenuation/amplification/regeneration).

not quite as funny as some other reviews

[Tyrannosaur]

http://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1324918463&sr=8-3

the reviews for uranium ore cannot be beat in funniness

Re:not quite as funny as some other reviews

[will_die]

Skip the funniess, what is uranium yellowcake flavor?
http://www.amazon.com/Harcos-Labratory-Nuclear-Uranium-Yellowcake/dp/B00380OEV0/ref=pd_sbs_indust_31

Because you are screwing something up

[Sycraft-fu]

There is no way when things are set up properly that HDMI looks worse. The reason is that it is all digital. LCDs are, of course, digital devices. So is the computer. When you go to VGA the signal gets converted to analogue, and then the LCD has to convert it back to digital to make it usable. There is room for error there.

If I was to guess I'd say there are three potential problems you have:

1) Overscan. This is a throwback to the tube days and it is stupid that it is still implemented, but there you go. You want no overscan on your TV or graphics card, they both can be set to do it. You want 1:1 pixel mapping on both sides.

2) Colour levels. Again going back to the old NTSC tube days and their conversion to digital the levels for TVs aren't 0-255, they are 16-235. You can look up the technical reasons if you like, too long to type it all out. You don't want that for a computer source though. So you need to tell the TV to accept the full range input, and the computer to generate it.

3) Chroma subsampling. TVs have a lot of internal processing these days and it is usually not done at full rez, to save on effort. DVD, Blu-ray, and ATSC are 4:2:0 which means for each 4x4, 16 pixel block there are 16 luma samples but only 4 chroma samples. So TVs often process in 4:2:2 (8 chroma samples) which still does plenty well. You don't want that for a computer, it's output is 4:4:4 (no chroma subsampling) and computers rely on accurate control of it. So you need to disable all your TV's processing, often called "game mode" and also if your TV has a specific HDMI port marked for computer or DVI, use that.

Properly done, nothing looks better than digital when using a digital monitor. There is a perfect 1:1 transfer of information from the card to the monitor. Any analogue phase can only degrade things, not make it better. However HDMI and TVs were designed for the video world which on account of the legacy of NTSC has some seriously stupid and fucked up standards. Thus if you set shit wrong, it'll look bad.

So if you are wondering why VGA might look better it is because those things I mention are already set right. The computer doesn't do overscan on VGA (it is a computer connector, overscan is not done there), the TV knows colour levels are full range, and processing is disabled. On your HDMI inputs, you need to set it up.

Re:Because you are screwing something up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you guys continue to attack the retailer. They don't set the minimum pricing on these cables. They don't have the option of selling no name cables without all the stupid companies ripping the product out of every BB store. Also those audioquest are order only and not stocked in stores so they are one of many options.

But keep trying to trash every retailer that is trying to provide a service in a market where cable manufactures have the upper hand. Merry xmas!

Re:Because you are screwing something up

[Anonymous Coward]

I generated a fullscreen B&W checkerboard with each square as one pixel. With that up, you can see dramatic effects when fine-tuning your width, height, and other options. Getting the moire pattern down to a single bar made the picture coming out of my computer (VGA) much better.

Re:Because you are screwing something up

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, he needs to make sure all the image enhancement bullshit is turned off in his TV. It's usually on by default, and I was disapointed when my $450 42 inch LCD from wal-mart looked like shit with an HDMI stream from my computer but VGA looked fine.

The shit sycraft mentioned was all turned on in some way by default (but didn't have those names). Just turn them all off, set them to 0, etc. My TV actually didn't support any of this image processing with the VGA input, so it was a pure RGB one-to-one pixel mapping out of the box (yes, I know about the digital to analog and back to digital conversion).

The HDMI and other inputs all had the crap turned on by default and it was easily turned off. Now I see no difference between the two, but the HDMI is technically better because it's not being converted.

Then again, I'm running HDMI through a DVI to HDMI converter. Which should not require any mucking about with the data or DAC conversions, etc. but I don't know. The VGA stream was provided by the same DVI port but with a VGA adapter on it. This I know required no conversion, because DVI includes the VGA stream on the little crossed connectors to the side. In fact, I really do think DVI and HDMI are completely compatible video streams with HDMI missing the VGA and DVI missing the audio.

Re:Because you are screwing something up

[Anonymous Coward]

Here:

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Some magazines blatantly push these things

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a subscriber to the magazine Stereophile. I casually collect vinyl and love various pieces of classic and new receivers/amps etc so I thought it would be a cool magazine to subscribe to.

I had a year subscription and by about 3 months in, I realized it was basically a magazine crafted to convince rich old folks into buying $7,000 power cables while giving them glowing reviews as though there'd be no other way to properly listen to music again unless you bought a pair for yourself.

Not buying one...

[Anonymous Coward]

...unless they promise the FedEx guy won't throw it over my fence.

rj

Lawl.

[Anonymous Coward]

I sadly used to work for Best Buy and would sit in the back with my coworkers in geek squad and laugh at these comments. It was at least 6 months ago if memory serves me correctly. Good shit though.

Everyone here is WRONG. Ppice is NOT incorrect!

[wgianopoulos]

Well, you may think this is a typo on the Best Buy Site, but IT IS NOT. This lame company, AudioQuest actually sells this cable for this price. The only stupid thing Best Buy did was agree to actually sell such a stupid product.

other parts too

[KingAlanI]

I'd say this also goes for other aspects of a system - while the audiophile stuff is pointless or nearly so, it still helps to avoid the bottom of the barrel.
hardware, probably also resolution of the audio file formats

It cured my stut t t t t errrr ing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this awe some cab bbble curred my stuttterrrrring. Howevvverr, I stiiill cannnt typppe.

PROS: It cuuurred my stutttt er
CONS: I cannnt use it as a belllttt. Itts not loooong enouuuugh.

Re:It cured my stut t t t t errrr ing

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the video this joke came from

Consumers are ignorant

[wgianopoulos]

The problem here is many audiophiles Don't understand the difference between analog audio (where anything you do to make the cable better will make it sound better) and digital audio, where as long as you are getting the data without errors on your $2 cable spending 2 million dollars on a fancy cable with (insert your favorite element here) can't make anything sound any better. So companies like AudioQuest and Best Buy are able to take advantage of them. It is really NOT that funny.

Re: voodoo audiophiles like to claim

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, an oscilloscope is a fairly limited instrument. You can see things you won't hear, but you'll hear things you won't see. Why does it matter? The final output is the speaker, that's the expensive part. All this talk about electronics just hides the fact that most people can't afford proper speakers, either in money terms or in space terms (which comes down to money too at the end). It's easier to argue over insignificant things like frequency range and THD which are easy to measure, therefore blind people to the real story: what does it sound like to you in your home?

Electronics has gotten cheaper; speakers and large sound-treated rooms haven't. Therefore guess what people argue about? Things they can change cheaply, even if they're wrong.

You see, most blokes will be playing at 10...

[hades.himself]

These go to 11.

It misses one feature ....

[Anonymous Coward]

it does not (yet?) correct the spelling-errors of the reviewers (some are really cruel, but maybe I only don't get the joke).

Re: voodoo audiophiles like to claim

[Sycraft-fu]

Well I have to concede that it is possible, however unlikely, that there is something that we can hear but not measure (or more properly are not thinking to measure) and as such maybe a cable that measures the same could make a difference in an analogue system. Ya I know, unlikely as hell, particularly since double blind tests have never shown anything, however I will concede it is at least possible in theory.

However with digital, no such thing. All that matters is that the information correctly goes from one device to the other. That's the whole point. If a cable passes the information without error, then there is nothing any better, no improvement even theoretical to be had.

I hate Best Buy

[wgianopoulos]

The real issue here is that AudioQuest made up this lame product to try to scam consumers and Best Buy went along with this to try to suck people in to thinking this would somehow make digital audio sound better.

Care for a $5,000 Ethernet cable?

[Jim Buzbee]

Care for a $5,000 Ethernet cable? AudioQuest will be glad to sell you one of those too. Or maybe you'll spring for the $42,000 speaker cables? Fill your shopping cart using the handy price list found here: http://www.audioquest.com/pdfs/AQ-Retail-PB-2011-NOV-220d.pdf

Amazon has even more expensive cables

[elbonia]

It's not like other retailers don't have this issue, Amazon has several such cables.

http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Digital-Audio-Ethernet-Connection/dp/B003CT2A6I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1324924465&sr=8-3

Pricelist

[Anonymous Coward]

For maximum absurdity, see their November 2011 pricelist.

http://www.audioquest.com/pdfs/AQ-Retail-PB-2011-NOV-220d.pdf

don't forget the Badonkadonk!

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Same reviewing style, for a $20K hand-made tank listed on Amazon back in 2005: (http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE)

411 of 469 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars Hummer Destroyer., January 22, 2005

Reviewer: Badonkadonker (NYC) - See all my reviews
SO there I was stopped at the red light on 67th and Lexington in my Mini Cooper when this yellow Hummer rear-ended me. Before I could jump out and confront the moron driver, he backed up and drove off!! I was able to get his license plate number before he disappeared. I had seen the Badonkadonk on Amazon a few weeks prior and had thought that it was awesome, but the high shipping costs made me hesitant to buy it. However, with the Hummer incident fresh in my mind, I rushed home and placed an order for the Badonkadonk on the spot! Since I used my Amazon.com visa, I received 19,999 points which was cool -- I am going to use the points to buy an U2 edition Ipod which will go well in my Badonkadonk. But I digress! With FedEx overnight delivery, I had the Badonkadonk in my posession the next morning. I obtained the address of the Hummer driver from my contacts at the DMV and drove over to his crib and smoked his hummer using the built in Argon-freon-fusion laser. All that was left of the Hummer was a smoking hunk of metal. As I drove off, I could see the owner of the Hummer run out of house in his underwear and throw himself on the ground in front of the charred ruin in despair. It caused a tremendous sense of elation in me.

The Badonkadonk is well worth the investment; the built in Alpine 1200 Watt stereo system means that you can listen to your tunes and travel in style. And the Recaro racing seats and Momo shift knobs are cool. Run, don't walk, to your computer and order the Badonkadonk now -- you won't be sorry!

Gold-plated cables

[Digital Vomit]

Wow. This is even dumber than the gold plated fiber optic cables I've seen for sale.

Keep going...

[BenEnglishAtHome]

All signaling is analog and digital protocols/encodings ensure lossless data transfer (or are used with codecs that can handle loss).

Yep. But please take it further.

The crappier the cable, the harder those codecs have to work. Work them hard enough and they start to make errors. Make enough errors and the results become audible.

Look, I'm not saying the people who pay $500 for a special audio USB cable are right. I tend to think that once you get above "good enough" there's no use in spending more money. I also tend to think that the level of "good enough" is fairly low.

But I'll never dismiss the audio crazies completely. I was there when CDs came out. I knew they were "perfect sound forever" because all the advertising, all the magazine reviews, and all the completely unimpeachable science by highly-degreed people in white lab coats told me so.

I also knew they sounded like crap. I knew I could tell the difference between the first-gen Magnavox and Sony players (for those old enough to remember that battle). I nearly screamed in pain the first time I heard a second-gen CD player (Phase Linear! Yeehaw!) swapped into a high-end system that otherwise used a Goldmund Reference for the source.

Even after CD-based systems started to sound OK, it was easy as pie to hear the difference between run of the mill players made by manufacturers who didn't acknowledge the existence of clock jitter and those high-end players made by people who openly admitted they weren't quite sure what was going on but they were trying to measure and design-out the problems.

The science of reproduced audio always advances in the same way. Scientists declare that if it isn't being measured, it can't be heard. Human ears hear things that scientists declare cannot exist. Some scientists try to quantify what people report hearing. Some succeed. A new measure is born. The state of the art is advanced. Scientists then once again declare that there's nothing being heard because we don't have a measurement for it. And the cycle starts all over again.

I don't care if I can't hear the difference between cables or players or room treatments. I don't care if scientists can't measure a difference. If someone says they can hear it, I'll politely let them have their say and walk away without judgement. Far more often than the "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist" crowd would like to admit, those people turn out to be onto something real, something measurable...once the scientists get around to inventing the instruments and protocols to do the measuring.

I sure wish some of the /. crowd would be as open-minded.

Re:Keep going...

[Anonymous Coward]

The crappier the cable, the harder those codecs have to work. Work them hard enough and they start to make errors. Make enough errors and the results become audible.

Cut the crap. "Work them hard enough and they start to make errors"? Are we talking about the garden-gnome slave trade or about microprocessors?

In reality, it should be really easy to prove the benefit of such a cable: build your own CRC detector and make it light a led any time a correction is required, and light another led if uncorrectable errors occur. The fact that this hasn't been done is exactly why no one should ever trust these wire manufacturers.

Look, I'm not saying the people who pay $500 for a special audio USB cable are right. I tend to think that once you get above "good enough" there's no use in spending more money.

That's the wrong point of view. How about this question: once a cable achieves bit-perfect transmission (and USB has no error correction, so that should be immediately obvious), what value does a higher quality cable add?

I was there when CDs came out. I knew they were "perfect sound forever" because all the advertising, all the magazine reviews, and all the completely unimpeachable science by highly-degreed people in white lab coats told me so

And they were true. If you were there when CDs came out, you must know about the finicky process of cleaning your records, making sure the needle is dust-free and the turntable has been sufficiently protected from static buildup. The "perfect sound forever" referred to the transfer of data from medium to electrical signal, which is inherently imperfect in vinyl.

The science of reproduced audio always advances in the same way. Scientists declare that if it isn't being measured, it can't be heard. Human ears hear things that scientists declare cannot exist. Some scientists try to quantify what people report hearing. Some succeed. A new measure is born. The state of the art is advanced. Scientists then once again declare that there's nothing being heard because we don't have a measurement for it. And the cycle starts all over again.

Indeed... and what is the place of Audioquest here? I mean, they do play an active role in this cycle, right?

Re:Keep going...

[BenEnglishAtHome]

...once a cable achieves bit-perfect transmission (and USB has no error correction, so that should be immediately obvious), what value does a higher quality cable add?

None, obviously. Contention arises, though, when people try to define "bit-perfect". That tends to mean one thing to us computer types. It tends to mean "I can't hear any difference" to audiophiles. The problem is that lots and lots of audiophiles claim to hear differences between USB cables while us computer types hold fast to an unalterable truth that both cables are bit-perfect and anything the listener hears is just their imagination.

It's an interesting coincidence that you went to USB cables. Even the expensive ones aren't out of my price range and I'm in the middle of converting all my audio listening to a computer-based solution where every signal will, at one point, go over a USB cable. I intend to buy several at several price points and see if I can hear a difference. Given my age and bad ears, I don't expect to hear anything of note but it'll be a fun experiment.

The "perfect sound forever" referred to the transfer of data from medium to electrical signal, which is inherently imperfect in vinyl.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

The shtick at the time was that the sound produced by CD-based systems was perfect because that "transfer of data from medium to electrical signal" was perfect. Yet, for at least a decade after CDs were introduced, good vinyl-based systems sounded better (far better, easy-to-hear better) than CD-based systems.

CDs were only superior in crap systems because they were quiet and not susceptible to surface noise. Thus, to 99% of the market, they were the second coming. To people that cared about audio, people that measured the quality of their home stereo against what they heard at the symphony each week, CDs were a disease.

...what is the place of Audioquest here? I mean, they do play an active role in this cycle, right?

I'm not sure but I could hazard a guess. By selling power cables at USD$10,700/10 ft., speaker cable for USD$42,950/25 ft., HDMI cable for USD$13,500/16 meters, ethernet cable for USD$4,495/8 meters, and USB cable for USD$1,450/5 meters, they provide a benchmark of cost. They invite skeptics to test and see if there's really any reason to pay those prices, to do all that fancy-looking construction, or to use those expensive materials in those complex designs. (Yes, I downloaded their catalog/price list to have a bit of a read since I was unfamiliar with their products.)

When I was a young man and my ears still worked, I could hear the difference between Kimber PBJ interconnects and the crap that came off the big rolls at Radio Shack. I could hear that CDs sounded much worse than LPs. Both things, so said the "measurements are God" crowd, were impossible. Both things turned out to be quite possible once openminded researchers managed to figure out ways to measure what was happening.

So when Audioquest says in the intro to their catalog

...the frontier has moved on to the digital-packet information carried by HDMI and USB cables. Will this finally be the "bits-are-bits" uncorruptible digital data we've been promised over and over?

No...

Whether in analog form or as a translated "picture" in the form of a stream of digital data, passing an un-damaged audio signal is still well-nigh impossible ...

Every cable sounds different:

Every HDMI, USB, Ethernet, FireWire, Fiber-Optic

Every cable, analog and digital

they are throwing down a gauntlet. They're repeating the old audio adage that "Everything makes a difference." That assertion, over the last hundred or so years, has nearly always turned out to be true while people who poo-poo the

I'll bring up my analogy

[NotSoHeavyD3]

It's like trying to read a novel. If the paper and printing work are good enough that you can make out the words no improvement in paper or ink makes any difference. (IE Camus' the Stranger is a plotless, pointless mess of a book. Having a printing of super high quality ink, the finest paper, and gold leaf won't make it suddenly have a plot.)

Re:I'll bring up my analogy

[ArhcAngel]

WHAT! You mean the sales guy lied to me when he told me this cable would make GIGLI and ISHTAR good movies? Date night this week is gonna suck hard.

Re:I'll bring up my analogy

[fyngyrz]

Date night this week is gonna suck hard.

So.... win?

Re:I'll bring up my analogy

[Coren22]

HDMI will work perfectly well over a set of coat hangers. If you think you even need an actual HDMI Cable, you are fooling yourself :)

Crappy product description...;-)

[rts008]

In their defense, the mask has a crappy description.

How it should have been described follows:
'Recommended requirement: The Stylish Horsehead Reality Synchronizing Mask will re-synchronize the faster than light data transmission to the real world timeframe.
No more listening to an album and finding that your hearing is stuck in the future.
The Stereo Synchrotron in each channel gently slow the sound down to normal speeds without that 'train-crash' abruptness of other solutions.
No more therapy sessions to deal with hearing in the future mental issues....etc.'

The truly functional and beneficial nature of the Hosehead Mask have not been adequately stated...Marketing Fail!!!

This is peanuts

[Dixie_Flatline]

http://www.amazon.com/Omas-Limited-Phoenix-Fountain-Diamonds/dp/B002K6QB78/ref=sr_1_1?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1324933715&sr=1-1

This fountain pen is $47,000, and only because it's ON SALE.

The normal retail price is $60000. Because I'd like to point this out in all caps, I'll type out the price: SIXTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS.

FOR A PEN.

(I was looking for fountain pens a little while back and discovered this.)

Audiophiles are crazy, but there are apparently crazier people still. You can buy a nice BMW for that money. Or, y'know, pay someone's salary for a year. :/

Re:This is peanuts

[will_die]

Saw that and the $4.99 shipping fee, so they are sending through standard mail.
At least sent it with insurance.

I don't have much time.

[Anonymous Coward]

This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be sometime around 2007 for whomever is reading this. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. Something... happens with them. Something came through, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left. WE LIVE UNDERGROUND! ONLY YOU CAN STOP IT NOW. SAVE US. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES.

I don't have much time. This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be--

Cat4? Cat5? Cat6?

[CohibaVancouver]

What makes each category better than another? Just curious...

Re:Cat4? Cat5? Cat6?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're posting to Slashdot and can't even type this URL, for example? Forfeit your 6-digit UID at once and go register a 7-digit one right now, your /.-cred is revoked.

Re: voodoo audiophiles like to claim

[Man On Pink Corner]

*Well actually there isn't any room for voodoo with analog signalling either, and you can either measure differences in analog signal quality on a scope or it isn't there too.*

Actually an oscilloscope is good for about 40 or 50 dB of dynamic range, while your ears are good for around 100 dB. So you can indeed hear distortion in a sine wave before you'll notice it on an oscilloscope display.

The same is not true of a high-end FFT analyzer, of course.

I got panned for a smiliar review on Amazon

[mschuyler]

Thsi was for a $500 Ddnon digital HDMI cable:

"in their Feedback section, a place where dubious claims are highlighted. (Vol 199:2666, p.56) For those of you who actually paid $500 for this, I feel sorry for you because you just got duped. This is a digital signal. End of story. The claims about this are snake oil. If you believe this nonsense I've got this bridge I want to sell you in New York for a great price."

So 8 out 0f 18 found my review helpful. Was it my attitude?

Re:Everyone here is WRONG. Ppice is NOT incorrect!

[colinrichardday]

Why is it stupid of Best Buy? Even if few people buy it, it's not taking up much shelf space.

Re:Cat4? Cat5? Cat6?

[colinrichardday]

Cat 6 can go 1 gigabit/s. Some Cat5 might as well, I'm not sure. Otherwise Cat5 is 100 megabit/s

Price of Gold and Silver

[jmactacular]

Has anyone considered the possibility that this price is reflective of the current commodity values for gold and silver right now?

Re:Price of Gold and Silver

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean overinflated and falling rapidly?

Those reviews are good!

[Nicros]

But these are good too :)

How to Avoid Huge Ships

Re:Those reviews are good!

[beowulfcluster]

Hahaha "Read this book before going on vacation and I couldn't find my cruise liner in the port. Vacation ruined."

Check the picture... Something strange...

[kuhnto]

There is something strange about this cable. Check the enlarged image on Best Buy. Notice something strange? Some strange plastic case with LED lights on it? It looks like a 1980's vcr corded remote image superimposed onto a regular HDMi cable.

Re:Check the picture... Something strange...

[kuhnto]

Nrotice the button and LED. The black controller cable just ends at the connector. I bet this is some sort of fake cable where the proceeds go to some dark power.

where have i gone wrong

[louisrosa]

Oh so dumb i am. i actually do read the reviews to help decide between two things i am researching. you can tell that many are bots or whatever, produced by the company. however, if one reads through the chatter, you can get some idea of the issues people have with the company. i fear these online reviews are bogus. is there any data about the number of these reviews that are actually done by the company marketing department? would seem like a good project for a graduate student. i smell a class action.

Sold out

[GNUThomson]

It's too late. I wanted buy one, but it's sold out. Anyone wants to swap? I'm willing to offer in return two high-performance, no bit-loss guaranteed, 1 meter long USB2.0 cables, 500USD each. They are from the same high-end category: my HDD started to work faster when connected through those cables, my piece of crap webcam suddenly became streaming full HD. It's really a life changer!

unnecessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Having seen this same mis-information poured over in the tech sites for what is approaching a decade now, it is utterly surprising that fangurrls and dotards cling to the myths. But then given nutrition and diet fads, it is also no wonder.

14 Gauge stranded copper is all you should need for true audio reproduction (well confined to the audio arena now) unless you are running a system greater than 8 ohms and for more than a couple of hundred feet. And yet the fortunes spent on "designer cables" thinking that gives a higher fidelity is ridiculous. This is where companies like monsterinc made their inroads to dis-information.

The driver contruction will dictate the true sound and anyone selling any speakers should include a frequency response graph. The enclosure should be constructed to optimize the particular driver freq response graph of the individual drivers and is a complex process, including material types, baffles, channeling, etc, not to mention crossover (active or passive) networks.

The 2$ hdmi is the basically the same as the most expensive nitrogen loaded, gold tipped falacies, but you will get idiots that were salesperson convinced that it will make a differrence. They bought the $200 dynamex tv and the $1k cable lol.

It is unfortunate that now all information on the web is mere advertisment meant to part you from your money.

HDMI Cables ARE Different

[CIStud]

Most of you buffoon, never-had-a-second-date-in-your-life commentators are so enamored with yourselves that you are ignoring the facts. There ARE differences in HDMI cables. Read this. http://www.cepro.com/article/why_2_short_hdmi_cables_yield_different_results/K35

You're just as bad as the religious audiophiles

[hudsonhawk]

This is a common viewpoint here, that based on your poor understanding of the science involved it's not possible. Meanwhile, the audiophiles, based on their poor understanding of the science involved, assume it is.

HDMI has no error correction, and is prone to jitter. So yes, changing an HDMI cable can theoretically affect the quality of the audio and video output by the device.

I'm not saying the price is justified, because that's pretty absurd. But making a blanket statement about what isn't possible without any understanding or experience is just as ignorant as doing the opposite.

Re:You're just as bad as the religious audiophiles

[Pharmboy]

And you keep making the same mistake the other half of readers here make: not reading the whole comment. If 100% of the digital signal gets transported over the cable, it doesn't matter if it is a $10 or a $1000 cable. I want to think I've use that 100% expression a few times in this thread.

I will make even more simple: If the cable can transmit all the data without error, you can't improve on that.

Misleading reviews and ratings.

[antdude]

I feel bad for newbies who will think these reviews and ratings are real. :(

Cable spoof

[lsatenstein]

We have a chain store in Canada called Dollerama. I got my 4 foot diamond design, copper wire silver plated conductor, with gold plated connectors and hardened gold filled pins, for the measly price of two dollars.

The cable is guaranteed to not work if you kink it, but otherwise, they claim that it will even undistort signals, making fine line images sharper than ever.

It was so good a deal, that I took another cable as a skipping rope for my granddaughter.

Yes you've used that expression and it's wrong

[hudsonhawk]

If 100% of the digital signal gets transported over the cable, it doesn't matter if it is a $10 or a $1000 cable.

If 100% of the signal gets transported, but the cable introduces jitter then it will result in errors during decoding. It's not just a matter of 100% of the signal arriving, it's also a matter of arriving at the right time.

I Am Rich.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody remember the $1000 app that did nothing but put a photo-realistic icon of a ruby on your iPhone and cost a thousand dollars so you could show it to people, and they'd know you were able to waste a thousand dollars for a piece of shit code that did NOTHING? Well maybe these cables are like that. They should come with a framed copy of your receipt to stick up on the wall behind your TV so when people look behind your TV to marvel at the superexpensive audio/video cable, they can see and marvel at the frame and the receipt. Afterall, if you're TV costs $25,000, and you've hooked it up to your B&O sound system, you can't use just a cheap 25 dollar cable...

Common Practice On Aggregate Sites

[Readycharged]

Changing the price from a competitive one to a hugely disproportionate one when a product is sold out is a common practice on sites like Ebay and Amazon - and now presumably Bestbuy.

You see the products on these sites are subject to a 'best match' algorithim which is based on the amount of clicks the product . If the product listing is withdrawn (due to it being sold out or unavailable), it receives no clicks and is consequently demoted in ranking when it is relisted (as the automated system assumes that rival, similar products are more popular).

The longer it is unavailable, the further it is demoted. This can lead to a loss of premium visibility when it does come into stock, for the reasons given above.

It seems weird, but it is sometimes better to keep the item listed at a ridiculously prohibitive price, than to remove it from search (particularly if the item was popular when it was available) so that it does not lose its ranking when it comes back into stock. As previously mentioned, this practice happens a lot on eBay and Amazon.