Not for me. I dropped $1200 on a TV just a few months ago, plus money for the HD box, Blu-Ray player, HD home theater, TV stand and other assorted bits, and my approach to cables was, “There is no way in hell I’m dropping another $300 on cables just to hook this crap up.” Quality hardware makes a difference. $70 cables better damn well come with an affirmation coach to continuously massage my buyer’s remorse.
This will sound kind of cliched and lame, but you should really check it out for yourself. I have a few hundred-ish level speakers (Grado SR60s – not quite a hundy new, but getting close – maybe sixty bucks or so) and my 1970s Dynaco (12") speakers (you could probably get some used for twenty or thirty bucks or less), plus some $50-$100 Sony and Sennheiser cans (don’t know the model numbers).
Absolutely there’s a difference between even lower-end speakers like mine and lower-lower-end products like you’d find for similar prices at a big-box store. I’m not saying anything is better necessarily, but there is for sure a big difference. Boutique AC cables, eh, not so much, maybe. But the first part of the audiophile battle is getting to hear that there is a difference, and then and only then figure out if you like the difference.
Anything else, I’d agree, but speakers (including speakers in headphones) are one of the few areas in audio where anybody can hear the difference.
(FWIW I’m still skeptical about even well-known, well-respected audio engineers (the guys with real EE degrees and major chops in the studio) talking about “resolution” in amplifiers, though – maybe I’m not the best source, or what’s probably also true, don’t have the best ears.)
This lines up with my guesses. Try going to Best Buy and buy a cable that isn’t Monster. First you will have trouble finding one, then you will get a hard sell from the salespeople on how Monster is da BOMB and nothing else is worth looking at, whywouldyouevenconsiderbuyingoneofthosecheapcablestogowithyourprettynewHD?
Anyone work at Best Buy? I’ve wondered if they get a higher/extra commission of selling Monster Cables.
Cables matter for guitar-to-amp, and Monsters are medium-to-high priced cables that are rugged and good for the money, although I am not buying gold-anodized tips, etc. that the high-priced Monster cables have.
I have a few, alongside a few other brands. There was an article in last month’s Vintage Guitar, where a vintage amp repair expert said one of the best mods you could make, besides upgrading your amp’s tubes, was getting a well-made cord.
What’s funny is that is that folks like Stevie Ray Vaughn preferred the lower-priced, lower-quality curly cables if they could find them and they worked. Those old Radio Shack specials would cut some of the highs and therefore his tone was less ice-picky. I got that from an interview with his guitar tech, Cesar Diaz - who also said that SRV got it by idolizing Jimi Hendrix, who apparently also liked those cords…
Yeah ok. I’ll PM you my address and you can send me some $100+ earbuds for testing purposes. How soon can you have them to me?
On the scale of things normal people care about, cables are pretty damn far down there. If you just bought a $3000 entertainment center, the relative price difference between premium & non-premium cables is pretty small and it easy to convince someone to plump for the difference to get the “optimum viewing experience”.
Oh, come on. You don’t really think that there’s no difference between even a $2 earbud and a $60-$70 Grado, do you? Even a $500 set of cans will sound different from a lower-end set like mine and that’s a verifiable natural fact. There’s no need of a cite, because, well, a blind nut-squirrel can get it done without one also.
:smack:
You could come and try mine out any time if you’re nearby.
Seriously – there is a world of difference in quality from tinny treble/muddy bass sounding mass-market headphones and speakers and higher grade equipment. There are definitely “diminishing returns” after a certain price point, so that while the aforementioned Grado SR-60s or SR-80s at about $70 a pair are clearly superior in sound to any stock headphones you might get with a music player, that’s not to say that you should go out and drop $1,700 on Grado’s top of the line PS1000 headphones unless you’re the sort who (a) has got that kind of money to blow, (b) can (or believe you can) appreciate the incremental improvement in sound quality, and (c) deems it worth it. (I had SR-60s until the cable broke, then I got the SR-80s, I would recommend the SR-60s to anyone.)
As for earbuds: I tried both the Etymotic ER-6i earphones at about $75 a pair and the higher-grade ER-4Ps at double the cost. To me, ER-4Ps were clearly much superior in a blind test. The ER-6i’s were OK but they didn’t blow me away. Forget “noise cancelling” software baloney, the best noise cancellation is ISOLATION!
Of course, it all comes down to what is outputting the sound signal anyway, and what you’re listening to. If you’re mostly happy with listening to MP3s compressed at a 128kbps bitrate on a bus, don’t waste your money.
The same is true of video cables as well, particularly for analog signals: more expensive, thick-gauge and heavily shielded cables may be necessary for long runs to avoid ghosting. (Digital cables will be an all-or-nothing thing.) I’ve run 50-foot component video cables for a DLP video projector (and later upgraded to HDMI), and can say from firsthand experience that using more expensive cables definitely made a difference even for HDMI. But what Monster does in charging ridiculous prices for three- and six-foot cables is just marketing aimed at preying on the unknowledgeable shopping on a price basis and hearsay (“I’m spending $1,500 on the HDTV, why not $75 on the cable, and I know I’ve heard about Monster Cable”).
One area I will speak up for Monster though, again from personal experience, is in their power supply products. After using a higher-quality (not Monster) 50-foot component cable, the ghosting and drifting in the image quality I’d been seeing before went away, but I continued to get a “hum bar”, a vertical line of interference that scrolled from the bottom up to the top of the image at a regular rate (about 60 Hz). Very annoying on an otherwise very clear picture. A guy at a local A/V shop recommended using one of Monster’s power bars “to clean the A/C power”, and I skeptically bought the $40 HTS800 with the promise that I could return it the next day if it didn’t resolve the issue.
Well shut my mouth, it did the trick. And then I looked up “dirty power” and “A/C hum bar” and it’s a legit phenomenon with a legit technical solution, and at $40 Monster’s even got a very nice price on it.
Can’t say I was expecting this type of response.
My last post a comment on the price in general. It doesn’t matter if $100 headphones sound better than what I’m currently using if I can’t afford to just run out and drop a hundred bucks.
You apparently can, therefore I (jokingly I should add) felt ok with hitting you up to send me some. Forehead smack indeed.
That may be true, but there’s ample evidence that that’s how most people think.
It’s basically anchoring at work. When buying expensive things, people don’t weigh the add-ons nearly as much. So, if you’re already spending $1500, another $100 is just a 7% increase. This is why people routinely spend hundreds of dollars on floor mats for $20,000 cars without much thought, but will drive an extra mile and wait in line to save $3 filling up their tank. The floormats (or, in this case, the cable) is lost in the noise.
I also interpreted it more as a scoff than a hit-up… But if you’re serious, and feel you can repair the headphone cable (the phono plug is snapped off) and replace the now-kinda-ratty foam earpads, send me a PM and I will gladly send you my derelict Grado SR-60s just so you can come back to me and Jaledin and say, “you were right about these cans!” 
Absolutely this. Active noise cancellation is mostly hype, but it does not work nearly as well as some wannabe pundits think. Isolation is purely mechanical, doesn’t kill batteries, and works a lot better when you’ve got the right stuff. Etymotic Isolators and Shure SE430s are among the best at that, and they do they block out the noise exceptionally well. As in, don’t even try holding a conversation with someone with these in your ears. ANC just adds cost for questionable benefit, and are almost like the Monster Cable thing in that in practical use they don’t nearly live up to the hype.
This is true, but any filtering power bar will do the same thing. Monster also make a $150 home theater power bar that even has a gimmicky LED display showing you the power fluctuations (noise), and will even let you toggle between filtered and unfiltered so you can see the difference numerically that the power bar is making. It is essentially the same thing as the $40 model. $40 is a good price considering it’s a Monster product, but there are others that do the same thing as both that and the higher priced one (but without the gimmicky LED display).
I once heard some very expensive speakers in a store. They sounded very good but if you moved to certain spots in the room they sounded bad. The salesman actually told me about this problem before I noticed it on my own. I guess I give him credit for honesty.
I won a 26" 720p HDTV in a raffle. I hooked it up in the bedroom to the analog-only cable (too cheap to pay for another box on a TV I rarely watch) and the only HD content I get is the OTA stuff the cable company has to provide by law.
Apparently I used better search terms this time – it was the LessLoss Blackbody.
It ‘takes advantage of the quantum nature of particle interaction’! For only $959!
That’s the one, yes. I knew it wasn’t that gag site. LessLoss appears to have their own brand of scammy cables too. Y’know, to help filter those pesky ambient electromagnetic phenomena.
I especially love the unattributed testimonial sound bites. “Before, my system sounded great, but my foot only tapped about half the time. Now with all LessLoss cords, including their digital cable, every time the music plays I can’t keep my feet still.” Amazing. It’ll even clean up biological phenomena, too. Your ankles will feel 16 again! Or, “I have to say that, even on just plugging the cable in with no burn in, I was quite surprised by the effect. My reaction was essentially “you have to be kidding me.”” Yeah, I had the same reaction.
ANC is useful because you can turn it off. To me, it’s too dangerous for me to have ANC on when I’m walking around town since I need to hear traffic. But when I’m on a plane or at the gym, it’s bliss.
In fairness, we don’t know what offer was actually made. If Randi just said “hey, sign up for the challenge” then in fact the response by Pear Cable is quite appropriate, even if it is sort of illiterate; they are not making a paranormal claim, and so aren’t eligible for the challenge. The text of the challenge is quite unambiguous; the claim must be a claim of a paranormal ability.
Now, if Randi is separately offering $1,000,000 independent of the JREF Challenge, then Pear Cable is chickening out. But I can’t really tell from the provided links if he’s doing that, or just suggesting they apply for the JREF Challenge even though their claim quite obviously would not qualify.
I mean, Pear Cable’s claims are transparent BS so they’re not going to put their products to the test no matter what, but actually getting JREF to engage in a test is pretty much impossible. They won’t test claims that aren’t paranormal, and claims that ARE paranormal can’t get past the initial requirements because they aren’t true. IIRC, there has never been a final, formal test in the history of the JREF Challenge, even though there have been hundreds of applicants.
I paid 16 cents for a 10 foot HDMI cable(plus $2.34 shipping) from Amazon.com. My picture looks pretty clear.
Hah, I tried (and failed) to convince a new airman in my shop that he didn’t need to buy the $50 HDMI cables from Best Buy for his new 40 inch 1080p HDTV he got for his dorm room.
Of course, the fact that I failed to convince the airman that he didn’t need to spend a month’s pay on a TV way too big for his dorm should have probably been a good clue for me that I wasn’t going to talk him down from the overpriced cables.
His entire eloquent argument for getting the HDMI cables? He just said “HDMI.” over and over again, as if just saying the name of the product with more emphasis was going to change the fact that his HD signal got to the TV via several miles of cheap Co-Ax cable, including a hundred feet or so in the military dorms that were quite possibly built by the lowest bidder. :rolleyes:
I’ll invest in HDMI when I run out of Component and RCA connectors on the back of my TV. 
As for why the more expensive brands sell better? As has been said, many folks don’t know better, and many folks assume the more expensive brand gives better performance. And in the case of some products, more expensive does make a difference. Just not these so much. 