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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."
Is this perhaps a $10.95 HDMI cable?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
...or does it reach out with a rough, calloused hand?
The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for tax writeoffs.
This sig has exceed its monthly bandwidth allotment.
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.
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.
I bought 20 of them. It will probably beat my mutual retirement fund, if the recent past is any indicator.
Gently reply
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.
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.
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.
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.
It pales in comparison to the reviews for this product:
Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable
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
The 5-meter cable is $2700 at Amazon. WTF????????
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.
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.
British slang for "sucker", though it's also commonly used to refer to the average patron at a business.
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?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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*
If Amazon can sell a book for $23 million, what's wrong with Best Buy selling a $1000 HDMI cable?
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Humor. You don't have it.
No sig today...
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
No sig today...
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....
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?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is Slashdot. Technology is religion for most of us here.
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.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yep, I have humour.
Citation needed.
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.
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".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
[uncomfortable silence]....HOW ABOUT them Bears!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I hear if you coat the wire in blue sharpie it makes it work even better!
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Why, I once transmitted a TWO over this cable and it WORKED GREAT!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable"
Tried that and I went from picking up Mexican radio to church radio.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
1 poster plus 4 moderators fail reading comprehension.
XML causes global warming.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
rewriting history since 2109
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.
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.
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.
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.
John
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....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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".
Not a sentence!
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.
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!
Wow. This is even dumber than the gold plated fiber optic cables I've seen for sale.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
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
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no one ever dies and it never ends
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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?
This space unintentionally left blank.
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.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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!?
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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
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.
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.
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I read it in an article in Stereophile. From their "computer audio expert" guy. It's also a popular belief in the forums.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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".
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.