HDMI cables - Monster worth the money???

[Karaya One]

Tammy and I did our part for the economy Saturday night and went to Circuit City and bought a 46" Toshiba Regaza LCD. Tax free baby!

We bought the three year service plan, too.

BUT - the salesman began pushing these $100.00 Monster HDMI cables. It seemed really steep for a cable. We waited, and then Comcast GAVE us one with our new HD-DVR box today. Looks great, works great. Awesome picture.

Now - is the Monster brand cable really worth the $100.00? What will it give me that the free Comcast HDMI cable isn't?

OMT - he was also pushing for this in-house service in which a tech comes in and "tunes" our new LCD for the room. To make sure the color and picture is correct. $150.00. What exactly is there to "tune" ?

[NobodySpecific]

HDMI Cable, Home Theater Accessories, HDMI Products, Cables, Adapters, Video/Audio Switch, Networking, USB, Firewire, Printer Toner, and more!

That is for all of your cable goodness (in the future). Almost universally, Monster cables are not worth the money. I have one as my guitar cable, but only 1) because I used to work at Best Buy and got it cheap and 2) they have a lifetime replacement guarantee, and I am not gentle on my guitar cables. For anything else, don't waste your money, especially with HDMI. The only difference between HDMI cables is their bandwidth, and if you buy a low bandwidth cable, then you may need to buy another one in the future as technology develops. But I would rather buy 20 $5 cables than a single Monster cable.

I know nothing about LCD tuning other than that some DVD movies have had some software that helps you tune it included with the movie. Generally, and especially if it is Comcast, they will come, push a few buttons, and charge you $150 for the pleasure of wasting your time. Look it up online, you should be able to find something that is actually worthwhile.

[Doc]

The tuning is a waste of money.

[Nate Dawg]

NO...not worth the money. Go to Radio Shack. I bought 25ft of HDMI from Radio Shack for $120 verses Monster for well over $300.

[idratherberidin]

If you are going to be using Comcast, they give you a FREE HDMI cable with your High Definition box.

[Nate Dawg]

If you are going to be using Comcast, they give you a FREE HDMI cable with your High Definition box.

They only give you about 6ft. In my case I needed 25ft. Unless your running blueray, 1080P and a ton of info. And I mean a TON you don't need the Monster Crap

[idratherberidin]

They only give you about 6ft. In my case I needed 25ft. Unless your running blueray, 1080P and a ton of info. And I mean a TON you don't need the Monster Crap

Is your cable box on the front porch?

[NobodySpecific]

NO...not worth the money. Go to Radio Shack. I bought 25ft of HDMI from Radio Shack for $120 verses Monster for well over $300.

And it is under $50 shipped from monoprice...oh and that is for the HDMI 1.3a cables, the lower bandwidth cables are less than that. You can get a 40' normal HDMI cable for a little more than $50 shipped.

[R1]

my .02

we recently did the same thing went to circuit city and left with a killer tv. what i have found through the past almost 3 years with HDMI cables starting with my tube hd tv is that the brand name does not matter. its what the cable is rated for that does.

I went through numerous cables from comcast with no major difference in my old tv other than compatibility issues. (cant really tell you the technical aspect just that some worked and others didn't.) so now we bought the nice HD 120hz lcd and found that the cables do make a difference but its not in the manufacturer its about the cables frequency rating.

we went with monsters for ease of purchase with each component we bought, we also got the cables at circuit city but in, retrospect we may have found a cheaper cable with the same ratings online but for the quality we seen on the tv in the store the best way to get what you seen and not feel cheated is to run the same setup.

so we got the tv out of the box and tried the cables i had accumulated with the various components and can tell you it made a huge difference in picture quality......

with the comcast cables the picture was very grainy and it pixelated often (i wanted to be sure that i was not wasting the 120$ per cable) then out came the new cables and the difference was huge, again dont know if this is another one of the poor cable quality cables or compatibility but the cables rated for 120hz made a world of difference in not only the picture quality but cleared up most of the pixelation during fast moving scenes in movies and games.

still some pixelation but it can be attributed to the feed to my hd box is off a 7.5 leg of a splitter with about 35 feet of cable after 15 year old drop running to the house so all in all with probably only about 12db from the street its still pretty good. I plan on throwing an amp inline with the box soon, but i want to clean up all the lines at once so it can wait. the ps3 is good enough for now.

I know blah blah blah

but yes the ratings for the cables make a big difference in the high end lcd and plasma screen tv's but the brand name doesnt mean shit. you can be like us and pay top dollar for the cables and know that they are good cables or you can shop around like i did the first time and through trial and error find what works best for your eyes.

It really doesnt matter unless you think that youll end up like me and get pissed off when the picture is not perfect.

[DucDave]

...look whose back! Hope you're feeling better!

[R1]

eh.... I've had better days......

very very very medicated right now. but in good spirits.

[Kurlon]

Monster cable is a freaking scam. End o discussion.

Oh, and as to the 'frequency rating' fun, it's real easy to tell if your cable is up to snuff or not, it'll either work, or it won't. There isn't an 'in between, degraded picture' state for borderline cables. Thats the beauty of digital. (Oh, and to those of you claiming you can 'hear' the difference between optical and coax digital audio cables, there are meds that can help with that too.)

Signed - Your friendly neighborhood electrical engineer

[R-S-V]

+1 for monoprice, great products and good price. Got a 25ft and HDMI switch and the quality is great. Monster is a waste of money. For analog yes you need good cables (there are better alternatives to Monster as well), but for digital signals though its pretty much the same.

[Kurlon]

I'll have to go find the test results that show Monster isn't any better on analog signal carrying, either low level (pre-amp cabling) or high level (speaker). They are just overpriced and selling on hype and buyer ignorance. Why they never bought out the company selling $500 a piece beechwood replacement knobs for HiFi setups I never figured out. They even brag about their 'acoustically tested varnish.' You can't make stuff like that up, and it smacks of Monster marketing, it'd be a perfect fit.

[VinceF2]

also +1 on monoprice... I have HDMI, component and other cables from them... never been dissappointed...

I actually wired my basement with them

[R1]

.02 more

i had email after email and phone call after phone call over cables i either bought or was supplied by the cable co. i had one cable throw a copyright protection mode where my cable box would not initialize with my tv if i left it on. and these calls and emails were with the tv manufacturer and comcast. i also had multiple techs come out and verify every little problem i had... went through 4 hd boxes and countless cables.......

I had to turn off the cable box and turn it back on to get it to work and 9 times out of 10 it was fine but every once and awhile it wouldn;t work and i had to hard reset my cable box pull the hdmi cable from both the tv and the cable box plug them back in then turn everything on tv first.

seriously not everything just works.

then the speaker wires the only noticable difference is with the optical audio cables. they allow true dolby surround and the sound is crisper and clearer.

then speaker wire is all in the listener. its up to your ear. you can pull out all the tools in the world to measure the quality or the frequency but it doesnt matter.

really none of this matter unless we are talking seriously high end stuff here. you know the stuff that has to be calibrated to the room.

seriously go with what you like. if you think monsters a scam then buy something else, i personally have not had a problem with any of the monster cables i have bought out of the box, but have been through shit loads of random cables.

the price was well worth the piece of mind.

[GixerJockey]

I am so glad I got out of the audio/video/appliance retail industry...

[Kurlon]

then the speaker wires the only noticable difference is with the optical audio cables. they allow true dolby surround and the sound is crisper and clearer.

0110 is the same as 0110 no matter how you deliver it. Anything you're hearing is placebo effect. If this were not the case, we'd have to have translators on all our routers just for dealing with the data corruption when going from optical to copper and back. TOSLINK is the same signalling on both cable types, if you can do it with optical, you can do it with coax, and there isn't one bit of difference (did you catch the pun there?) in the world.

then speaker wire is all in the listener. its up to your ear. you can pull out all the tools in the world to measure the quality or the frequency but it doesnt matter.

Again, placebo effect. If it can't be measured, it's because it's not there.

seriously go with what you like. if you think monsters a scam then buy something else, i personally have not had a problem with any of the monster cables i have bought out of the box, but have been through shit loads of random cables.

the price was well worth the piece of mind.

I didn't say buy junk cables. I string Cat6 instead of Cat5 or Cat3 when I know the link is only going to be 10baseT because it doesn't cost much more, and I know it'll handle GigE down the line without errors. Getting the 'mosnter' labeled equivalent would be paying 100x as much per foot instead of pennies more per foot. There are crap cables out there, but there are also good ones that don't cost anywhere near the highway robbery Monster charges.

[GNTurbo6]

I'm a tech for Circuit City and I used to be a car audio installer too. I would say the thing about Monster, and pretty much any other accessory/wiring/etc is that you're paying for convenience. With Monster, you know you're getting a quality cable. If you buy online, you can find a cheap no name brand that may cost 1/4 as much, but you'll have to do a ton of research.

Calibrations (or "tuning") aren't exactly worthless. They're a good idea but I don't know if they're worth the price. Usually you can find someone else's calibration numbers on A/V forums and just use those. Sure, they may be off by a few #s for your exact set and your exact tv environment but it will be really close and you'd never know the difference.

The way one of my managers explained car audio installs to me makes a good deal of sense. You aren't paying just for labor, you're paying for knowledge. You could sit around with your thumb up your ass for 3 hours trying to install a radio, or we could do it in 15 minutes. It's up to you to decide how much your time is worth to you.

[Woodsy]

gizmodo did a story on them a while back and this is what they found

here are my caveats to Monster's truths:

• If you are going from any source to a 720p or 1080i TV set, you should really be in the clear using a full-on crappy ass cable.

• As long as you're not doing installing the wiring in your wall, start with the crappy cable. If it sucks and you only paid $20 for it, go back and spend more on something certified.

• In the demo, Monster even proved that good components can offset crappy cables: that PS3 and that Samsung 1080p were able to work around much of the problems, all the more reason why, in a non-custom non-in-wall installation, you should try out the lower grade stuff first.

So listen, you've heard it from me: there are differences in cable, but there are also differences in technical requirements. We don't all need $120 cables for our components. As to the question of why Monster won't offer a lower-priced product in recognition of these differences in technical requirements, Lee told me to "stay tuned

read the full article here:
Field Notes: The Truth About Monster Cable

[richw]

Got mine at walm,art works fine not 6 feet only

Also got the best wal mount walmart.com for 150
best buy wanted 400 for a worse one

[stoinkythepig]

I'm curious, what is the advantage of HDMI cables over component video?

I find it utterly amusing that Comcast can send you hundreds of high qaulity channels, AND telephone, AND high speed internet over thousands of feet of cheap and simple coax cable, but Monster wants you to think you need the last 10 feet of cable to cost $100+ for one stinkin' video signal that represents less than 1% of the bandwidth that came in on all that cheap cable.

[Honclfibr]

Component video is still analog, it's just that the individual colors are separated rather than combined onto a single cable (composite). You still get the usual noise issues with analog transmission. Plus, an LCD display will need to convert the analog signal to a bitstream before displaying.

HDMI is digital, there should be no noise introduced into the signal due to cabling, there may be bit errors but these should be recoverable. As with a digital cell phone you shouldn't really get noise, it will either work or it won't.

Not to mention, HDMI is a whole lot less bulky than component cables, it will carry full 1080p resolution and 5.1 audio on a single cable.

[stoinkythepig]

Component video is still analog, it's just that the individual colors are separated rather than combined onto a single cable (composite). You still get the usual noise issues with analog transmission. Plus, an LCD display will need to convert the analog signal to a bitstream before displaying.

HDMI is digital, there should be no noise introduced into the signal due to cabling, there may be bit errors but these should be recoverable. As with a digital cell phone you shouldn't really get noise, it will either work or it won't.

Not to mention, HDMI is a whole lot less bulky than component cables, it will carry full 1080p resolution and 5.1 audio on a single cable.

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like a good idea to use HDMI, if you have a TV that allows it. Pretty sure my old 1080i Panasonic does not even have HDMI ports.

[R1]

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like a good idea to use HDMI, if you have a TV that allows it. Pretty sure my old 1080i Panasonic does not even have HDMI ports.

ah but check for dvi......

the dvi cable caries the same digital signal that the hdmi cable carries minus the audio, just run either a set of component audio cables or and optical audio cable and your good.

but try the comcast dvi's first. they have eveything you need, you just need to call and ask them.