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Topic: 3ft HDMI cable for $1,299.95
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 11-02-2019 07:42 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
On the other hand, I wonder how many of these things actually get sold.
For some reason, the high-end audiophile community is full of this junk. Magic rocks, CD demagnetizers (yes, really), and $1k power cables are common. I don't get it.
Studies have been done in relation to quack medicine (as in, actual snake oil and things like it), which show that the placebo effect is very real in some people, and furthermore that its power increases in proportion to the amount of money spent on the dubious medical product. I can only presume that the same applies to quack cables and other hifi and audio-visual accessories. They must sell in significant quantities, because the glossy hifi and home theater mags are always full of ads for them.
A friend of my wife's has a hifi system in his living room that he claims (and which I can well believe) cost $80k in total. The living room in question could not be a worse acoustic environment in which to listen to high end audio if an architect had set out to design one: it has a vaulted ceiling about 25ft above the ground, vast expanses of glass on two of the walls, a bare, polished wood floor, etc. etc. You can hear your own voice echo in there. To my ears, his $80k system sounds no better than mine, and the HF not as good, as mine, the components of which cost around $1,200 in total. But maybe that's the placebo effect working in reverse...
To avoid causing a family argument, I refrained from saying any of this while I was there. but it was really hard to stifle giggles when he proudly explained that even the fluid for his $5k record cleaning machine costs $300 a quart. I'm sure that my $80 Spin-Clean, with homebrew fluid consisting of half a cup of 98% pure isopropanol, two or three drops of dishwasher rinse aid and then diluted to a quart with distilled water (total cost = a few cents per record cleaned), works almost as well, if not as well.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-03-2019 02:17 AM
About a year ago I was in Berlin, in the fancy warehouse called KaDeWe they were demonstrating an even fancier new kind of speaker. The listening room was a glass box in the middle of the showroom.
The people working there were from the company that built those special looking speakers.
They were pretty offended when I told them that I cannot judge the quality of their speakers in such a bad listening environment and what I heard from it was pretty mediocre with a boomy bass.
Also, I once had an "audiophile" family member over to listen to my "hifi system", when I just bought a bunch of pretty decent (but not really earth shattering) speakers from a now defunct English speaker company called Mordaunt Short for no money at all. Unfortunately, I didn't have any speaker wire left with sufficient length, so I ended up using a bright yellow power extension cord to connect them, I was pretty pleased with the end result, so I never changed them. The kind of extension cord usable for outside, but I was living in an apartment, I didn't need to mow the lawn... The wife absolutely hated it, but the audiophile was more in love with my speaker wires than with the rest of the system, especially after I assured him it were some very special cables. I remember reading a similar story, where someone ended up buying orange colored power leads to connect a bunch of Quad ESL speakers for a trade show and how everybody ended up asking questions about those very special cables...
Like Leo indicated, there's a whole lot of placebo in there. If you spent north of 2000 dollars on a bunch of stupid cables, YOU WILL hear a difference, even if science can't prove any audible differences at all. Even if science dictates that it's bollox.
Now, there's a difference between people who are willingly spending way too much money on stupid cables and other esoteric gear and the constant ripoff that's happening in electronics stores. I'm getting red hot when my father in law tells me that he just spent EUR 70 on a new HDMI cable to connect his crappy 1080i cable box to his TV, because he was told it would improve the quality of the colors and the contrast. I guess it was about two months ago when I witnessed such a sales pitch for a gold-plated super-fancy HDMI cable (not even certified for 4K) to an uninformed young couple and I couldn't help it anymore and I rudely interrupted the sales pitch and called the sales guy out on his bullshit...
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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 11-03-2019 11:42 AM
Probably not as important for HDMI and Ethernet cables that stay plugged in all the time, but we had a real problem with low cost USB cables. The problem was not the cable, but the connector (mini - B). The low cost cable did not have an insertion rating on the connector. After a few hundred cycles (recharging closed caption receivers after use), the insulator tab in the connector would wear down and the contacts would buckle. when the user continued to plug this into our receiver, it destroyed the connector on the receiver. We changed to a Tyco USB cable (with an insertion rating of 5,000 cycles) and have not seen the problem since.
At times, the higher priced cable (in this case, something like $5) is better. Other times, it's not.
Harold
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 11-03-2019 11:58 AM
Without a doubt, there are various qualities of cables out there. It is tough to pin down, however. The ratings are a joke. Who is really enforcing that? Even if you find a brand you like, they can switch their supplier of components or their supplier could move their source to a more econmically favorable facility. Back in the day, we were putting pullout keyboard/monitors...we settled on Tripplite because the others didn't seem to hold up. Then, when they switched to widescreen versions...all heck broke lose...they would make warranty just fine but within a couple of years, they started dropping like flies (while the original ones are still going fine).
For USB and like cables, we still like Tripplite...they have held up well and we use USB 2, USB 3, with mini and micro ends as well as standard sized. Even the Tripplite amplified extension USB cables have done very well in USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 (can ingest or play a movie on an amplified USB3.0 cable and CRU drive to the likes of the ICMP.
For HDMI cables...there are many factors...are they 18Gbps cables or 10.8Gbps (or worse). How stiff are they (are they likely to not stay plugged in?). My "favorite" HDMI cables are Extron's Ultra series...they work VERY well, handle 18Gbps and are VERY flexible...but they are 4-5 times the cost of a Monoprice cable. Monoprice can make/supply some very good low-cost cables too but they have a wide range so one has to pay attention to which model they are getting.
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