You think Monster Cables are expensive?
Try these.
This has been the sales pitch that I’ve experienced (edited only slightly):
Me: Do you have any cables other than these Monster ones?
Obnoxious Salesperson: No. We only carry Monster cables because they’re the best. If you try them, you’ll see that they give you far better picture and sound than the other cables.
Me: I’ve never seen any real difference. Thanks anyways.
OS: Have you actually tried them? Because I have and let me tell you, the difference is like night and day. Everyone that uses them can tell you that they will give you a 50% brighter picture, more lines of resolution, 103% more highs, cleaner lows, and more natural colors. One woman I know had hooked up her brand new 50" plasma TV using generic cables and all she could get was re-runs of “I Love Lucy”. As soon as she switched to monster cables, her reception was so good that she started getting next year’s Super Bowl…
Me: Yeah, I’ve compared them and I don’t think there’s any real difference.
OS (looking at me with a combination of scorn and pity): Well, if you can’t discern the obvious difference, maybe you should go somewhere else to purchase your inferior cables. Because our integrity and dedication to quality won’t allow us to sell such sub-par products.
Another favorite tactic is the apples to oranges comparison. I have, all kidding aside, seen a display in a major electronics store where they tried to prove the superiority of Monster cables by comparing identical TVs and DVDs hooked up with Monster cables and generic cables. Only the Monster cable was a component video cable whereas the generic hookup was done with a completely different type (not just brand) of connection. They weren’t comparing Monster to “brand X”, they were comparing component video to RF (Or composite - honestly I don’t remember which it was because as soon as I saw that they were using a different type of connection, I dismissed them as scam artists).
I wonder though: are the people who manufacture these cables deliberately scamming the public, or are they fooling themselves as well and truly believe that the products they sell will produce better picture and sound?
The worst thing about Monster cables isn’t the markup. The worst thing is the connectors, also known as Death Grippers. I remember trying to take coax off a TV set while helping a friend move and the @%& cable dislodged the coax connector on the back of the television!* I’ve heard the same complaint from others as well. I suspect they use the cheapest components they can find and some of them wind up making an interference fit with the A/V equipment they’re connected to.
I’ve had good luck with http://www.bluejeanscable.com/ which, while not the cheapest, offer the exact lengths I needed. For basic hookups anything at Sears/Radio Shack/etc. should work.
At least those look pretty. Kind of like pasta - expensive, inedible pasta.
…But they said the Monster cables would embiggen my sound and picture!
There are some elements of truth in what they say, but there’s a world of difference between some element of truth and the practically significant.
Resistance and capacitance in cables generally reduces the fidelity with which they carry signals.
And there are even weirder things, like Litz (litzendraht) wire, where individually insulated strands are braided together in a way that gives each one the same average exposure to the exterior of the bundle - this was used for winding AM radio ferrite antenna rods.
Grounding and avoiding EMI is quite the art in itself, involving for example all sorts of shielding and interconnection methods. A great book is “EMI Troubleshooting Techniques” by Mardiguian. However, in the case of audio systems, the way you interconnect them, and how you arrange the signal and power wires and nearby devices with big transformers in them, is way more important than which brand of wires you do it with.
But the nonsense you hear from Monster selling clerks and readers of the Absolute Sound seems to me much less worthwhile than filling the body seams of your car with toothpaste to reduce aerodynamic drag and improve performance.
Oh. What kind of toothpaste?
That’s strange. Coaxial connectors usually screw on & off, except for the super cheap ones that come with a VCR.
Monsters do have a tight connection, but I always considered that a good thing.
The thing to remember is that audio frequencies are very low, impedence of speakers is low, and these two factors combine to make for a very, very undemanding cabling environment. You just don’t need anything fancy. In fact, i remember a double-blind test where one speaker was hooked up with a $500 speaker wire, and the other with rusty coathangers twisted together, and none of the ‘experts’ could tell the difference.
If cables made so much difference, you’d see all kinds of research papers for it. NASA would spend huge dollars on exotic cables for their high frequency stuff. Mil-Spec would include all the fancy cable claims.
In some cases, cable quality really matters. Up in the microwave frequencies, for example. Video cables should be of good quality, with low-loss coax and good solid connectors. But there is no reason whatsoever to spend more than $100 on any video cable, unless it’s of extreme length. It just doesn’t cost that much to build a quality cable that delivers a signal indistinguishable from any other. RG-6 quad-shield is less than a buck a foot, and good quality connectors can be had for $10.
This post discusses their rabid defense of their products.
Also, can someone explain the power conditioning thing?
With a poorly designed or cheap power supply, it is possible for power line noise to be coupled into the audio amplifier or other parts of the device. For most people, power line noise is not a problem. If it is, a relatively cheap filter will solve the problem. Most well designed electronics equipment have a built-in AC line filter to keep noise and other crud out of the power supply.
All of the engineers that I know just buy quality cable and connectors from companies like Belden and Amphenol. It’s much better than the junk at Radio Shack and nowhere near as expensive as the high-end cables marketed to consumers. These are commercial suppliers that provide real engineering data for their products. They have to compete with other suppliers on quality and price.
If they really cared about quality, they wouldn’t be using RCA connectors in the first place. RCA connectors were designed to be cheap, not good.
>If cables made so much difference, you’d see all kinds of research papers for it. NASA would spend huge dollars on exotic cables for their high frequency stuff. Mil-Spec would include all the fancy cable claims.
You do, if you look. They do. It does.
Actually, I’m going to go for a third option from those who are saying scam/notscam.
Monster cables are not a scam. They do provide, via the improved shielding, measureable improvement in signal transmission and minimizing interefence.
The problem with this is that it doesn’t mention that at the level of improvement being discussed, the consumer is paying another order of magnitude in cost for each halving of the transmission and interference errors.
So, in practical fact, unless you’re extremely sensitve, or using your stereo in a soundisolated environment, you’re not really going to notice the improvement. So it is a scam, after all.
This market does have its share of snake oil as well, but I’m **very ** glad that I bought a Panamax conditioner as it does take the garbage out of the incoming power. Without it, running a mixer in the kitchen (or my obsessively tidy neighbor’s vacuum cleaner) will obliterate the TV picture with static. With it, not a blip to be seen.
Same goes for the subwoofer - without the Panamax, it hums in sync with the picture on Channel 4 - there’s so much RF in the air here that it’s being picked up by all those antennas, otherwise known as power lines.
But it seems that it’s not just a matter of diminishing returns, it’s a matter of no returns at all. I’ve never heard of (and no-one in this thread has ponted to) a single independent double-blind study that’s ever indicated that anyone, no matter how sensitive, can tell the difference between Monster (or equivalent) and any other reasonable quality cable for A/V performance.
They may do all sorts of tweaking of the electronic properties of the cables or they may not. I neither know nor care because it simply doesn’t affect how the A/V components produce the end results. They can spout all the technobabble that they want, but it’s still the equivalent of streamlining a space-ship that will never enter the atmosphere.
Basically, a cheap power filter will remove the various types of fluctuations that normally occur in household power systems due to interference and noise, which could result in decreased picture and sound quality (ever hear that background "hum?)
Monster markets “reference power” systems, but you can find products from Belkin and Panamax cheaper that work just as well. After I hooked it up, my analog cable channels show a marked difference in picture quality (digital was unchanged, as far as I could tell) and I was able to turn the volume up on my amp a lot higher than before without it shutting down due to overload (not that I do this a lot, but it always concerned me when I could not crank it more than 50% of its rated max).
Some say conditioned power will add to the lifespan of your equipment. I can’t personally verify this.
I could use an item like this, but the adds I read make my bs detector spike like an old-time VU meter on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”
What is a decent one which will work well with my 42" EDTV Plasma?
Of course, I y h o?
This is the one I bought two years ago - still available through Amazon’s “Z Shops” for considerably less than MSRP.
One of the selling points was the $5,000,000 coverage against spike/surge damage - Having lost two desktop radios and a microwave oven and quite a few light bulbs in the past ten years from spikes, I look for that sort of thing. (It’s pretty obvious when the lights get really bright for a moment, a couple blow out around the house and the radio doesn’t work right afterwards - all preset stations lost and it won’t take new ones.)
If you have $25,000 worth of stereo equipment you might, on a clear night, with a full moon, at low tide, notice the difference if you are using Monster speaker wire. 3 foot RCA plugs… no (unless you are using REALLY cheap RCA cables and you will know the difference just by looking at them).
I haven’t looked at amps in awhile but I would expect a high-end amp to use something like optical cables between components. Spend your money on better components if you want better sound.