Stephen Gentle

I just thought that I’d add to my last post on HDMI cables with an analogy I thought of. To put it simply, the notion that there will be any difference in picture quality between a $5 HDMI cable and a $400 Monster cable is exactly the same as saying that putting your videos on a more expensive USB drive will make them look and sound better, or that a more expensive memory card in your digital camera would make you photos higher resolution – that is, completely ridiculous, and completely wrong, for obvious reasons.

Simply put, all of these mediums are just moving a bunch of ones and zeros. Given that describing a one or a zero from a wave is far less prone to error than an analog signal (I’ll put up a diagram of this soon), you can be pretty much assured that your cable, USB drive or memory card will transfer the data exactly as transmitted.

So to sum up, Monster Cables are a downright scam, (as are any other company that sells pointlessly expensive digital cables to consumers), and essentially all the claims that they make on their packaging (like better quality picture, richer sound) are all false. Of course, if you ask the salesperson at the local department store, they’ll try to flog the most expensive cable to you, and make up implausible (and wrong) reasons about why you should buy the more expensive one. But remember that they are just out to get the commission, and most of them will tell lies to sell it to you – unless they are genuinely taken in by the scam.

I was quite appalled to go into Harvey Norman yesterday and to see that they are selling HDMI cables at anything from one hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars! The cables aren’t even that long – they had four metre ones for about $400, with a 10 metre one for a shocking $599. They are covered with the normal marketing stuff – how it guarantees a ‘better home theatre experience’ and general junk like that. The worst offender for outrageously (and needlessly) expensive HDMI cables is a brand called ‘Monster Cables’, but there are others like ‘Gecko’ and ‘PureAV’. Some of these companies even sell expensive optical cables with gold plated connectors! But why are these cables such a rip off? First, there’s the fundamental fact that they are digital cables.

An analogue signal, which is used to carry video and audio in the older Composite, S-Video and Component video standards, can be degraded with a low quality cable, long cable lengths, and possibly interference from other cables (like power cables). It is worth spending a little more on these cables, like the $60 component cable we bought with our DVD player. A digital signal that these HDMI cables carry, on the other hand, is not affected by cable quality. Generally, unless the cable is broken, it will deliver a perfect signal, which means a perfect picture. Basically, a $12 dollar cable from Monoprice, or even the $3 cable that came with my monitor will always give just as good a picture as the $500 Monster cable. Furthermore, all cables that carry the HDMI logo must be certified to deliver an essentially perfect picture (HDMI certification requires less than one in every million pixels be lost, or something like that. A human would have trouble picking up one in five hundred.).

Clearly these Monster Cables are very high quality – but the only thing that means is that they won’t break as easily. And it’s not even like HDMI cables are often in a position where damage would ever be a problem, and even if a cheap cable did break, you could still buy twenty or thirty new ones for the price of getting a single Monster cable!

Monster cables do not ever give you a better picture, sound quality, or any other benefits than the cheapest $5 bargain bin HDMI cables. If you don’t get a perfect picture with an HDMI cable, then it is broken – nothing to do with the quality of the cable. I would advise everyone to never buy Monster brand cables, or any HDMI cable over $100 – unless it’s 30 or 40 metres long or something.