Slaying the Cable Monster: Why HDMI Brands Don't Matter | Hacker News Reader

Slaying the Cable Monster: Why HDMI Brands Don't Matter

pcmag.com

25 pointspwg28 comments

Is it just me, or does this at the beginning of the article:

"For digital signals like HDMI, as long as there is enough data for the receiver to put together a picture, it will form. If there isn't, it will just drop off. While processing artifacts can occur and gaps in the signal can cause blocky effects or screen blanking, generally an HDMI signal will display whenever the signal successfully reaches the receiver. Claims that more expensive cables put forth greater video or audio fidelity are nonsense;"

directly contradict this at the end?

"No one saw any appreciable difference between the $3 cables and the $120 cable, or any of the cables in between. However, we did notice a curious phenomenon: the screen appeared slightly darker and a bit more saturated when connected to the Blu-ray player with the Monster Cable 1200 High Definition Experience Pack cable. The HDTV showed that it was receiving the same 12-bit color depth information through each cable, so the more-expensive Monster cable wasn't pushing through more color detail. Again, the difference was minimal, and could be corrected by calibrating your HDTV."

The contradiction there immediately makes me assume all of their testing methodology is bogus and any other "facts" they introduce in support of whatever argument they're trying to make are probably suspect...

I know they're right, and multi hundred dollar Monster Cables are snake-oil, but I'm also left with the distinct impression that anybody who finds the Monster Cable's transmission of a digital video signal "curiously darker and more saturated" has shown themselves to be incapable of convincing anyone that they know enough about what they're doing to change anybodies opinion. (In fact I _strongly_ suspect Monster's notoriously evil marketing department have had a hand n this "review"... How long till we see articles linking to this saying "Look, even the skeptics who know all the digital domain science can see the improved picture from our Monster Cable 1200 High Definition Experience Pack cable!" Notice how strongly brand and product specific that statement is, it's almost as though it's specifically written for SEO juice...)

The one that really surprised me was USB cables. I needed a USB cable on Friday night. I checked Best Buy and the best they could do was something like $36 for the length I wanted.

I then found that I could buy THE SAME cable from MacMall for $6. Not a generic brand--the exact brand name cable. Same manufacturer's part number and everything. And I could get overnight FedEx with Saturday delivery by 10 AM for $10. So, from MacMall the net result would be half Best Buy's price for exactly the same thing, provided I could wait about 14 hours for delivery.

(I ended up not buying from either of them, as a more thorough search of my cable drawer turned up the cable I needed).

For USB cables, here's what I now recommend to people. I think this advice applies to other cables, too, such as DVI and HDMI and network cables:

Someday, you are going to find that you need a cable and don't have the one you want on hand. And you'll find you don't want to wait for overnight delivery, so you are going to end up going to Best Buy and spending way too much for your cable.

So why not take a measure now to make sure that does not happen? Go to some place like monoprice.com, and give yourself a budget of, say, 75% of what one long cable would cost you at best buy. Use that budget to order a variety of cables. For example, for USB, for the cost of one 10 or 12 foot Best Buy cable, you could get 2 or 3 long USB cables from monoprice, 2 or 3 six footers, and a handful of 2 or 3 footers. Do that now. No rush, so use the cheapest shipping.

Now you've got a stock of cables, and as you use them you can replenish your stock at your leisure. Even if you end up never using many of the cables you will be ahead as long as this saves you from a single Best Buy cable purchase.

Best Buy's business model is to overcharge people for peripherals like cables and warranties. Their thinking is that when you are buying a big ticket item like a TV, you compare the prices of the item and not the total costs of all peripherals and additional warranties. So Best Buy says "let's have the big ticket item be the cheap thing that brings people in, but then we will get them on the price of cables." And of course their salesmen are trained not to let anyone exit the store with a TV or a computer without buying a bucketful of cables and extra warranties.

So yeah, that's why their cables are expensive, they are their profit center.

It used to be that Radio Shack was a good cheap place to buy cables, but they also raised their cable prices. Radio Shack could have made a fortune just selling cheaper cables to Best Buy customers, but instead they decided that they could compete with Best Buy and raised their cable prices accordingly. Of course Radio Shack stores are way too small to sell big ticket items, so they failed and Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy.

So now the internet is the only place you can get cheap cables.

I like to take advantage of this by approaching the salesman while holding about $300 dollars worth of cables, negotiate a lower price on the tv and then return the cables the next day.

The general phenomena of which they are taking advantage is called anchoring - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

In the case of HDMI cables, I think the term you are looking for is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging

>Best Buy's business model is to overcharge people for peripherals like cables and warranties.

Yea. I have known this for a while now. The real question is, what is the alternative?

Update: here is an article I just found:

http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2011/03/are-s...

I've found Fleet Farm to be reliably dirt cheap for cables. Most of mine have been about $3 or less, which is pretty much un-beatable online.

Otherwise, yeah, cables of any kind are often extraordinarily expensive. Buy online. And, most importantly, avoid Radio Shack.

OT: That's where I buy my socks! [1] Unfortunately, there are none near me, so I stop in when on a trip. Next trip, I'll have to head over to Electronics.

[1] I've found the Browning socks to be quite durable, although -- while my exact memory fails me -- their price seemed on the last visit to have risen to the point where I no longer felt they were a real deal (but I was still willing to pay -- and anyway, I'm a bit sick of bargains at the cost of "the other guy").

Man, you're getting old when you get excited about socks...

But, "hacking" your wardrobe becomes its own little diversion.

>Claims that more expensive cables put forth greater video or audio fidelity are nonsense; it's like saying you can get better-looking YouTube videos on your laptop by buying more expensive Ethernet cables.

Fantastic comparison. I'll have to remember that one...

The B&M markup on cables and adapters bothers me enough that I'll eat the downtime and buy from Monoprice or Newegg. For the price of one HDMI at Walmart, I was able to get HDMI, optical, and a display port->HDMI adapter from Monoprice.

There is no reason to buy cables from anywhere but Monoprice.

Monoprice's cables are very utilitarian, and they are extremely awesome at doing what they're supposed to do. However, if you want a thinner cable, smaller connectors, or different jacket for environmental or aesthetic reasons, they're probably not going to have what you want. They do have a wide selection of colors for HDMI and Ethernet cables, though, so even when buying a cable that needs to look good, I always check Monoprice first.

I've always been partial to blue jeans cables (http://www.bluejeanscable.com/) ever since I read their response when monster tried to scare them into a settlement over bogus patent claims.

OT, but wow, that site is sure using CPU. I'm seeing my CPU usage go to a consistent 70-99% just sitting on that page (Mac Pro with one quad core Xeon). It looks like it is their Javascript, as it drops to nearly nothing when I disable Javascript and refresh. (I've got Flash disabled, so it isn't their Flash ads). Anyone else have the Javascript go crazy there?

Using Win7+Firefox 4 on a core i7 930: 1% cpu usage without ads, 5% with ads. Think it's just you / your software.

What browser are you using? That's a critical piece of information.

Safari

The site uses a lot of CPU when loading, then settles down for me. Safari's CPU usage spikes up to 30% or so with Flash enabled, but I notice when I have Flash disabled, it spikes up to 105%. That's pretty backwards, hmm? But no, I see no sustained CPU usage with Safari on my Mac.

I did some profiling, and it looks like it is some Javascript that is trying to check to see if one of the Flash ads has loaded. It's being called thousands of times in a few seconds.

When you are talking about longer distances it matters a bit, but not much. We bought a long (50 or 100ft, can't remember) pricy cable for my friends parents, and the signal loss was so great that the TV only recognized the signal half the time, but it was all or nothing.

but yeah, 3/6/10 ft isn't gonna make any difference.

Less than a year ago HDMI cables were listed on Amazon for a penny. I ordered 4 for 4cents and then 2.98 shipping for the whole order. I think after California changed laws about lead in cables for energy efficiency, places were shipping those cables all over for real cheap. Now the $1.50 seems standard.

Myth: Digital signals can't degrade except in an all or nothing way.

Simple experiment you can do at home: Take your favorite audio source, convert to uncompressed 16-bit samples (just like you'd find on a CD), and clip the high bit to always be 0. Congratulations, you just degraded a digital signal.

Oh, the article then says "While processing artifacts can occur and gaps in the signal can cause blocky effects". If that isn't gradually degrading, what is?

"it's like saying you can get better-looking YouTube videos on your laptop by buying more expensive Ethernet cables." Anyone who's ever used a damaged ethernet cable before knows how wrong the author is on this point. It doesn't take many dropped packets before you can't stream HD video.

I 100% agree with conclusion, but there's something about the words "digital signal" that somehow makes people think they aren't signals.

But relative analog SNR doesn't change, that's the point. A glitch is no signal or infinite noise, depending on how you look at it. Blacks don't get blacker, highs don't get clearer.

It's only infinite noise very briefly, the next sample may be ok, and more than one bit are transmitted at a time. Consider that as you add bits to a digital sample, it gets closer to resembling an analog sample.

What an obvious and boring subject.

I agree; this really hasn't been news for 5 years, if not more.

And sad that still there are people falling for this.

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