I bought a PS3 the other day and picked up some HDMI cables at Best Buy, knowing full well I was going to take them back when I got a better price online, but I wanted to shell out the money today to see the pretty movies instead of the ugly A/V cables they pack into the box. So I got my better price today, which prompts both a rant and a rave.

Rant: $50 for a cable I have already replaced for $11. That's a little outrageous.

Rave: They charge $50 for a cable I can get for $11 with five minutes in the Google machine. That's a little hilarious. I still overpaid by probably a couple of dollars by going for a couple feet more in length than I really need, but the guys who think nothing of dropping $150+ for 4 feet of Monster HDMI cable make me a little sad. When my dad got his first HDTV, he spent a lot of money on Monster cables, and even though at that point I didn't have specific knowledge that it was of dubious benefit, I had a hard time believing it. But he bought it, and then when he upgraded I told him I'd get the cables, and I picked up whatever cheap stuff I could find online and he has no idea on his 60" display with 5.1 sound.

Hilarious. I'm going to have my new cables by Friday, and I'm going to turn my return credit into Madden, maybe.

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Listening to folks' technical jargon about what makes the monster cable superior is really entertaining. That and the bulk cable it's made from is less than $1 a foot.

Cheap optical cables can be hit or miss though. Sometimes you get screwed on those and they're really noisy. I have one at home that super amplifies bass and just about mutes the rest.

What amuses me are digital Monster cables. Those aren't even of dubious benefit, they're of NO benefit. It's digital. You get it, or you don't. Insanity.

$11 is still too much. Check monoprice.com

Too bad the cheaper cables you can buy over the internet take so long to get compared to a store who has to stock the inventory, hire numerous staff that require all kinds of wages to be paid out, has to heat the building, or cool it, waste money on lights so you can shop inside and pay tax's for the property and building to the local municipality where you live. Yeah it just bites that those things are so expensive!

That aside, the cheesy marketing that monster employs to sell those cables helps the store on margins, a cheap cable you buy for 11 bucks you may make 3-5 on, a monster cable for 50 bucks you make 20-26 bucks on.

Yes the monster cables are inflated, but surely they had something else on the shelf for less money.

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

That's where I went, and I included shipping in that price. Cable was 8.50 or so.

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most best buys don't stock anything but overprices cables, whether it's Monster or some other brand. I've never seen an inexpensive cable at best buy.

I tend to get my cables at Wal Mart, heh.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

You can't even get cheap cables at Radio Shack anymore. I was forced to do the same thing when I recently moved and one of my HDMI's was too short to run through the wall. Even then the cheapest they had was like 45 bucks.

Oh you can still get the same cheap cables at radioshack or the source in canada, but they tripled the retail on them, I pay 3bucks for the cable and slap a 29.99 price on it.

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

http://www.mouser.com
http://www.digikey.com
http://www.newark.com

Make them! Then sell cheap cables to your co-workers.

P.S. Even if you buy direct, a 3ft HDMI cable from Mouser is like $4.

My friend who works at Best Buy obviously gets the employee discount which is 10% over cost. The mark up on cables and batteries is insane there. I stay away from there as much as possible. Most big items are decently priced though.

Monoprice rocks; best price I can find for store bought cables is Wal-Mart.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

i bought at walmart then returned them when my cheap ones came in. cheap ones work just the same as the expensive logitech ones

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While I also find it funny with people talking about the actual cable specs being so awesome...

Quality connectors do make a difference. When ever transferring to a new medium for an electrical signal with out proper impedance and physical contact, you are looking at a degraded or even worse a distorted signal.

Can you cite some sources.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

An "electrical signal" eh? Tell me how a digital signal is degraded.

Well, digitally encoded analog anyway. Matching is far less important for digital signals at the rates audio and TV operate. For digital devices the cables and interfaces are built to a standard that is matched.

There's always one person in a discussion like this who will try to convince people that the facts are not facts. Congrats on being that person, Garborg.

We need gold contact cables with 1/2 inch shielding because of the resonance of the big bang radio distortion coupled with the earth's magnetic field slightly altered by the phases of the moon. Also, because pluto is no longer a planet.

They must cost no less than $70 to be adequate.

sold!

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I just may use that pitch, excellent!

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

Garborg isn't full of shit.

Impedance matching is actually very important once you start to get close to microwave frequencies. (By microwave I am referring only to the frequency of the signal, not the thing I use to heat up leftovers.) I don't usually worry about this until approaching 250MHz or so (this almost never happens for me). This is more or less the reason network analyzers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_an ... electrical)) exist. We use them to find the "S" parameters of a system to see what the properties of a specific device is (e.g. 2 port network). There are many programs out there that help you design just the right little stub of copper on your board for just this reason. http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdes ... tartPage=1
I believe this is what I used back in the day when I was taking classes. It was probably an older version, but same idea.

Here is the shortest primer I could find quickly on this subject.
http://www1.electusdistribution.com.au/ ... pmatch.pdf

This is the textbook most commonly used as far as I know. (It's the one we used in the class I took. I know it is still being used by people I know at other schools.)
http://www.amazon.com/Microwave-Enginee ... 0471170968

You can probably download it for free here. http://rapidlibrary.com/index.php?q=mic ... g+book+pdf
I didn't follow the link, so no guarentee.

This is for instance why I can't use A/V cables with my equipment. A/V is usually 75 ohm, and my stuff is all 50 ohm.

Now, as for the actual point. That's a different story to a large extent. The impedance of the cables you buy at discount are probably just fine, and unless they are damaged you probably won't see any issues with reflections that cause instability (ringing). However, if you plan to attach and reattach many, many times or have something you move around often I would worry slightly.

However, I have some coax cable that gets taken on and off equipment probably about 1-5 times a day. I am not springing for Keithley cables.
http://www.keithley.com/products/instac ... 7712-SMA-1
Ouch! However, I don't usually work with anything at very high frequencies.

I do make some of my own cables. However, unless you are going to make lots of cables it doesn't pay off to buy the proper equipment to do so. For instance, a crimper to make my own coax cables runs about 75-125.
You also have to have a good soldering setup including soldering iron, wire cutters, heat shrink tubing, air gun, etc. I would guess I blew around 350 initially. If you are not experienced in doing this, you are probably going to have a poor quality result. (I do this myself, and I don't trust anyone who works for me to do it.)

I think this qualifies for sufficient references for those who asked.

My point was with regards to HDMI cabling honestly ;P

I thought we all were. lol

It's important if you are a technician, working on a transmitter. It's not important to a consumer unless you are matching speakers to a receiver. Even then most of the time you can't tell there's a problem unless it's at a very low or very high volume.

There are standards for cable interfaces, and the standards are set up so we don't have to worry about it. Most people would oppose designing a balun transformer to use their television.

Well I got my cheap cables yesterday so I returned the expensive ones. So far I have yet to see any difference, except that I was able to parlay the return credit into some Blu Ray movies

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Do they charge a 15% re stocking fee for cables?

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It's Best Buy, not Newegg.

I called it an "electrical signal" so then I don't have to get in some silly debate about the words analog and digital. An electrical signal is just that, without concerns on how a person markets it.

I'll explain it like this. Receiver of signal needs a 1 or 0. A zero is required to be under X voltage while a 1 is required to be over Y voltage leaving a gap between X and Y that is indiscriminatory. At which point the the receiver will use the error correction to recover that bit. If too many errors have already occurred it will ask for a resend of that frame.

Thanks Ellen. geesh, you guys are testy. A digital signal depends on signal strength just as an analog signal, just not to the same extent because of error correction.


Sorry, my comment was made with knowledge of cables and signal processing in general. (I haven't owned a TV in 8 years) The home consumer hasn't always been so lucky with "industry standards" in the past. I was unaware improvements had been made to industry standards. I'm glad they have improved and concern over quality connectors is less of a concern now.

Ah there is the Neesha douchebag we've been missing, where have you been?
My original comment was made after someone scarfing at "technical" jargon of cables, but then went on to say that it was important for fiber. I was just saying it was important for all transmit mediums.
As far as people charging ridiculous amounts money for items hyped up, I'm all with you! Marketing is BS. Especially when it effects industry standards.

My examples were with coax rather than HDMI, because I don't work with HDMI cables. Coaxial cables are pretty universial, so I figured it was a good example. However, it doesn't make that much difference. Physics is physics.

It makes a bunch of difference. A digital signal is going to work, or it's not. You're not going to "improve quality" in any way, shape or form with "better" gold plated conductive cables.

Distance however, is another matter entirely and one in which quality of cable does make a difference. The difference being that it will work...as in, at all.

Voltage level based bit-reading (like TTL) isn't used much in transmission lines anymore. Most signals are processed or operate in some manner of differential mode. The level detect is based on the averaged difference over time, effectively averaging out noise. Reflections (which are tiny) are filtered by a similar mechanism to the one that provides surge protection within the device.

It almost has to be done this way to sustain high data rates. A lot of encoding tricks have to be used, which are almost always differential.

It was an example to help him understand how digital signal can degrade while 'magically' being an "electrical signal". But, thanks for the tip.

Maybe you would like to explain how digital signals can not degrade?

I guess it would seem this way to someone not understanding how the signal gets processed. Circuits have an error tolerance. Go over it and "not working". Go under it and "working". But "working" doesn't mean error free. And you can be borderline "working". And again I'm talking about digital signal processing, not just HDMI....

Not arguing cables, because I cannot tell a difference.

But, digital "works or it doesn't" is an argument that always confused me. Different streaming technology is digital, but if you have packet loss, you get choppy results.

No point.

The only signal strength issues I've run into is my on demand working, or not working. It's never quality, it either does or doesn't work. And that's mostly to do with Charter's bullshit. Occasionally I might get a few blips of signal here and there and get partial picture, but that means I get 1-2 seconds of working picture, then no picture. I'm not getting a bad picture, I'm either getting it or not.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

and that's digital for you, heh. it either works or it doesn't.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

clarification : you either get a picture or you get nothing.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

It's not a question of whether they can or can not degrade, it's a question of whether they can degrade over three feet of standardized cable connected to a standardized interface. In this case a $4 HDMI cable is just as good as a $140 HDMI cable. Not to the company selling it mind you, but to the consumer it is. Most of what you have to worry about is attenuation, which is negligible for any marketed cable length. Speaker wire, of course, is a different story. And if you're a HAM operator or something that too; and microwave ovens.

Digital signals can 'cheat' when compared to analog signals. They're less sensitive to noise, and less sensitive to signal reflection. The 'space' of slots you have to keep clean is comparatively small. You might sap a little more power, and your device may get a little warmer, but it will still show the same picture.

Are $10 rabbit ears as good as $40 rabbit ears?

Those you do have to match, so who knows.

Well from what I gather here, it depends. If the rabbit ears are for a digital signal... no never.

But if the ears are for analog (and therefore abide by physics), it would depend on the gain and quality differences between the two sets.

Should be, ...they are always the same.

The only thing I *have* noticed from one brand to the other of HDMI cables is the size of the plastic around the connector itself. I've had to return cables and go buy more expensive ones simply due to that. Set up my dad's home theater only to find out that we couldn't get a damn HDMI signal unless we held the connecter at exactly the correct angle. The area around the connector was too thick.

Now if we are talking old RCA interconnects for like, a Cd player I'd have to strongly disagree that good cables don't make a difference. It gets to a point, however, that you have to spend a silly amount of money to get to that point.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

physics makes us all its bitches



i will now stop posting for another six weeks

WTF is that? My ears curse you and my eyes still hurt.

Best buy is instant gratification shopping with a decent selection, anyone who buys technology knows to go online.

Or you have a gift card from someone who doesn't know better... (Right now I have $50 in gift cards that I won at work. I figure if I get another card or two, I'll cover the rest of the cost of a Nintendo DS for my son's Chanukah gift.)

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I read most of this thread but have a bit of info to share:

I got a Wal-Mart HDMI cable when I picked up my plasma, and not too long ago a buddy of mine that works at bestbuy grabbed me a "Heat and Wear Resistant" HDMI cable. All i noticed was the rubber seemed to be thicker along the cord and that's about it. Anyways, it was free so I took it, but he said it's retail there is $85.

lolmuch?

it's because the market is so easy to inflate the price on right now. Tons of people are making the jump to a new entertainment system who know jack shit all about what they need and what they don't. They have no problem going into a brick and mortar and expecting some salesman to know everything for them and know already what they need to buy, what to hook it up with and other bullshit.

I didn't know shit all about what I was really looking for, but I knew not to be taken for an overpriced cable.

Sure, people who have done some research know that a Monster cable is legal extortion, but some random fucker who just decides he wants a new HDMI to watch his football on doesn't give two shits and thinks that kid working at Best Buy is giving him quality service when he puts it in his ass and convinces him to drop a C-Note on a cable that has a store cost of about a dollar. For every person who is educated to know better, I would say there would be five or more that don't. Otherwise there wouldn't be a market for this overpriced shit.

I paid 20 I think for mine, and it was the "Buy this with your PS3" Sony one. I could have saved over half that if I went online, but meh. Time was worth the extra cash.