Is there really a different b/w spending 80 dollars for a monster cable and 40 for a Belkin cable.

Thanks

“Have you found a lower price for a 12 foot HDMI cable in this St. Louis?” “Are you aware of the differences in quality (this was Best Buys’s only 12 ft. HDMI wire, and we surely know that they are sharing price points with Kimber, Cardas, etc. Well actually I had to take his challenge, I had time to burn, my StL RAMS were stinking up the field. I remember I recently purchased a nice OPPO DVD player for another room with a six foot cord thrown in the box for about $150? I took the HDMI challenge!
I did find another12 foot HDMI at the Radio Shack for $79.00 three doors down within the strip mall, a savings of $30.00 with the 7% tax at both being a wash?

There again though, the thoughtful associate at the Shack suggested I go for the Monster brand though. Was it worth the walk at my middle age of 50 for about 6 minutes? Then the ultimate test, I come home to the holy grail of pricing, the internet and I find Firefold cables online (first time I have ever heard of the company, I promise I do not financial interest in anything one of these companies here, but some college tuition bills for two children, my retirement, etc., some of those real life things most of us do have), but here I have to settle now for (please sit down), a15 foot HDMI cable (25% longer mind you) for a total of $8.06 and no tax, but the first class shipping charge is a about a wash with the tax. I had to even settle for those gold plated tips too.

I think some of us audio veterans have a have a heart for the young kids entering the hobby today. And it is a hobby or passion for most of us. I can just image my son working for $10 an hour this past summer, and having to put in a full extra eight hours for that wire at the “Best” Buy? Which I still will be a patron.

My approximate 40 years of enjoying music has taught me, to one, buy used (be more selective and decerning on speakers here though). Put all you can in your speakers, there is where you will hear the largest difference. Then your amps, then work your way down. Cables, Interconnects and the snake oil capitol of audio, the power cord should be way, way down your list. Never use percents, for I have never worked for percents, never paid my bills in percents, use U.S. dollars.

If you can afford $8.25 for per foot for the new and ever changing HDMI cable, and the clarity is one that the BB sales advisor stated “even my girlfriend sees a tremendous improvement, with that brand cable”, then maybe you have to “go for it”. We all have to splurge once in awhile, right? But why not try the .53 cent a foot line first though, you may just be able to retire 10-15 years earlier adopting this approach once in awhile and have much more free time to hear much more music in your lifetime.

I can say with absolute confidence though, the equipment, wire, lines and patch cords that created the majority of these recordings we all listen to, cost only a fraction of the cost of what is any of our systems. Is this sometimes getting to the point of Audio Alchemy? How can something that goes in come out so perfect? My opinion, and its worth about this sheet of paper this is printed on here, cables, interconnects and powercords are just audio costume jewelry.

Just another viewpoint, I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
(Sir Charles Barkley)

The problem I have with “consumer grade” audio & video cables is the marketing hype of the “large” brand (pun intended) coupled with retailer greed in blister-packaging their own store brand & competing cables then pricing those “just enough” under the ridiculously priced brand to attract buyers. This “riding on the coattails” of the big marketer is tantamount to theft by deception.

There are some differences in cables, but paying 10 times as much for one vs another is absurd and should never suggest nor imply 10x the quality. You can get excellent quality cables for very reasonable prices. Unfortunately, with pressure on margins you’ll seldom find much in the way of reasonably priced cables at the same store where you bought your fine HT equipment.

10% of your HT budget spent on cables? That still seems awfully high. I guess it would depend on how much your budget actually is. For a $2,000 system spending $200 (10%) on the cables might be reasonable, but spending $500 for cables on a $5,000 system sounds more like someone’s getting taken to the cleaners. That same exact set of $200 cables should work equally well on either system and I have serious skepticism about the ability of anyone to prove that their eyes and ears can see or hear the difference.

In commercial broadcast we often made our own cables from bulk spools of brand-name cable (i.e., Belden) that at the time sold for a few cents a foot. Even the 5″ diameter nitrogen-pressurized heliax cable carrying our 50 KW signal to the top of our 1,200-ft tower was assembled on-site from (huge) spools of Andrew cable that sold for a few dollars a foot.

Gold-plated connectors? Well, if your component (amplifier, DVD player, etc) also has gold-plated jacks then I might agree, but otherwise you may be setting yourself up for some problems from the dissimilar metals. Anyone remember the problems the PC makers had with gold-plated memory being plugged in to nickel-plated tin connectors (and vice-versa) on the motherboards? It wasn’t long (about a year) before these dissimilar metal connections began causing many system lockups.

Right there you can conclude that any cable less than 15meters is good enough for digital signals to be able to completely ignore inter-symbol interference.

That is the problem where one data bit interferes with its neighbors as it travels down the cable. For DVI data, still digital mind you, the data rate is more like 600Mbits/s for a 720p data signal. That means cables shorter than 0.35m can ignore ISI.”

Too restate this in a more succinct way, the faster you want to transfer data the more important the quality of the cables. Cable quality does matter, even for digital transmissions.

I have also seen the sparkles from another cheaply priced cable at 10m, Currently I insist on cabling in decent quality HDMI/DVI cables for lengths of 10-15 metres +. These arent outrageously expensive ($125-$200 US or so) and have worked every time, in every install at every possible resolution. However these cables are VERY good quality, I could never see a need to spend more than this on high-end HDMI cables even for 15m runs.

This man speaks the truth, I was going to post the same thing.

For a quick speaker wire comparo, just wire up the left with a cheap cable and a better cable on the right side then flip between sides. You should be able to hear a difference.

Another factor why people don’t always tend to hear a difference in general with cable is they don’t have a trained ear. Think of wine connoisseurs, without a trained taste they probably can’t tell the difference between two different years of the same wine (2001 vs 2000 merlot from XYZ winery) but if they are trained they can probably taste the difference between two bottles of wine that are the same (both 2001 merlots from XYZ).

The best is to get some of the best cables you can afford and hook them up, if you cant tell a difference then return them for something cheap.

For DVI data, still digital mind you, the data rate is more like 600Mbits/s for a 720p data signal. That means cables shorter than 0.35m can ignore ISI. Much bigger problem for these signals and this is why cable construction and DVI receiver technology is so important for video.

The only other comment I’ll make about audio is that the detection of a 1 or 0 is not the only problem that is present. All digital audio receivers need to recover the source clock source of the data in order to play the audio. If a poorly constructed cable causes the signal to jitter excessively, the receive clock (if it can track this jitter) will also be jittery and this may be audible. If the receiver cannot track this jitter, data bit errors can result which are also audible.

Hope this helps the discussion.

Bob

I know we (4 of us atm) haven’t soldered a connection in years but even that’s going to take some clarification. We’ve been using the Cable-Pro compression fittings along with 75ohm RG59 for component and digital audio runs, and 50ohm RG59 for analog audio runs; from the head-end out to local Plasma’s/LCD’s as well as projector installations to back-up a HDMI or DVI connection etc.

In situations where those types of runs are too long, we’re doing the long haul with Crestron CNX-RMC’s and just breaking it out locally.

But for the actual equipment in the rack we’re still using preconfigured ‘traditional’ interconnects whenever possible. We just cant rationalize the time expenditure for custom cables every time unless we’re talking about a 2-gang Mid-Atlantic rack enclosure and a customer willing to pay for the difference in how much cleaner custom cables look.

Keep in mind I’m talking about at work (like I think you are). At home about the only ‘custom’ cable I have are a few RG59 feeds that run to a Gamecube on the other side of the room, other than that its all stock pre-made stuff.

Some people have them and just think it is a bad picture, but in the times I have seen them improving the cable made all the difference. There are certified HDMI cables of longer lengths for a reason.