The New Snake Oil

I'm sure all you electronically savvy peeps know never to buy cables at the retail stores right? I mean, even Radio Shack? Never, ever, ever.

 

Yeah, here's the thing. In the digital age, you do not need to buy expensive cables. HDMI for instance - if it passes your signals, it works. If not, say there is a break in one of the leads, then it doesn't. That's it. There is no in between. Gold connectors, extra shielding, even the new "high speed" HDMI cables, none of that stuff means anything. It's all crap.

 

You can buy the cheapest cable you can find and it will work just as good, even on 3D sources.

 

You can pay $130 for an HDMI cable at Best Buy. Seriously. That's why there was a Monster Park in San Francisco for a few years. When a company makes so much money on their cables that they can afford that kind of advertising, run, don't walk, away. Look at the above graphic of the various Monster "Speed Ratings". All bullshit.

 

You know how much an HDMI cable that performs exactly as well as that $130 Monster Cable costs on www.monoproce.com?

 

$2.77

 

That's $127.23 difference! And I mean it when I say the monoprice cable works exactly as well: it's all bits, a cable either works 100% or it doesn't work at all in the land of digital.

 

I just took a trip to my local Micro Center store to try to pick up a few cables I didn't want to wait for, knowing I'd have to pay more, but the cheapest ones I found were still an order of magnitude more money than the ones I went home and ordered online.