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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."
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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?
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.
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.
I could see a typo on a single item, but Best Buy offers a complete line of cables from this company, all over $1000.
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.
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
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
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.
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 hear if you coat the wire in blue sharpie it makes it work even better!
That, and amazon also sells them for a equally idiotic price.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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?
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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
-
- - 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.
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.