Newbie Success Story

[nitrogen_widget]

I did spend about $60.00 on high quality cables. I see posts in various forums inisting that you should use the best cables you can possibly afford but not sure I'm convinced.

I wonder if I had posted my question in the support forum if anyone would have thought i'd be dumb enough to be running my video card in16 bit color.

I found that Big Lots (is that a nation wide company?) carries some nice gold plated & sheilded RCA A/V cables for about $6 a piece.
I think i've bought all my cables there & they have made a world of difference when compared to the cables that came with my STB's.

[nitrogen_widget]

I agree - Monster cables are a well-known ripoff (I mean, hdmi cables for $90!? It's DIGITAL ffs; it either works or it doesn't). I also think that there is a lot of misinformation spread about using expensive cables - if you are running over 50' maybe, but for the majority of us I defy anyone to see a difference.

(before I get jumped on, this is not the same as using composite versus coax, or s-vid over composite, etc... more the inflated price of the 'Premium' stuff)

My father bought a monster hdmi cable from radio shack with his DVD player recorder. He wanted the best for upscaling to his LCD widescreen.

He paid $70 for it.
I told him it was a rip-off, however he can afford to pay those prices so I didn't make him take them back. I just told him he got ripped off.

My brother on the other hand was more than happy to take his Monster cable back & let me order him an HDMI for $17 online & he has a perfect picture.

When I bought my car amp back in the days of when I liked loud music they tried selling monster cables for $150. :mad:

I went to Home Depot & autozone & built my own cables for about $15.

[Ted the Penguin]

ok now when you get into the area of audio cables, then yes ther is a large difference in cable quality, however I dont think that it is noticable in cars. there is way too much noise in cars for the quality of your cables to make that much of a difference, as long as they are the proper gauge. along with the freaking box waveform most amps apply to bass to get more power and kill the quality.

however in home theater situations, you have to at least use the right gauge speaker wire to keep sound quality... this can be taken over to avsforum if you really want to have fun

[bdgbill]

I'm using a 4 ft $35.00 Monster SVID cable from my STB to my TV and a $1.00 8 ft SVID cable from my video card to my TV. I can see very little defference in quality (now that im running my vid card in 32bit color) between recorded shows on the PVR and video straight from my STB to my TV.

I think a lot of what you pay for in high quality cabling is shielding against interference. If you don't have any interference in the first place then you are not likely to see a benefit from expensive cables.

That being said....I am shopping for a new TV and have spent a lot of time in Circuit City, Best Buy etc in the last couple of months. Sales people are pushing these expensive cables HARD. Best Buy doesn't even carry an HDMI cable for less than $50.00.

Even though I feel like a sucker I will probably pop for the Monster HDMI just because I don't want to take the chance of being disapointed with a $2000.00 tv because of a cable.

[HtV]

however in home theater situations, you have to at least use the right gauge speaker wire to keep sound quality... this can be taken over to avsforum if you really want to have fun

Speaking of rip-offs . I just bought myself a nice Denon stereo-amp with 4 Kef-speakers and a Denon-cd-player. So I did some investigation on the net. Speaker-cable up to €500 p/m in the shop where I bought my stuff.
I found a very nice informative site (in dutch:p ) where it is explained very thorough what is nonsense and what is not. One of the simplest but most convincing arguments was, that in high quality recording studios they use very standard quality cables.

There are a lot of english sites aswell that deal with this kind of stuff.

[elite]

One of the simplest but most convincing arguments was, that in high quality recording studios they use very standard quality cables.

There are a lot of english sites aswell that deal with this kind of stuff.

I was about to post that (glad I read the whole thread first ). The patch cables etc in every studio I've worked in have been the cheapest cable going and are usually hacked together on site anyway. I have even worked in one studio where the speakers were driven on standard mains cable :eek: with no noticiable effects, not to mention the number of 'custom' cables cobbled together with electrical tape.

The most common problem with cables other than loose connections etc is interference - Always run video/audio cables separate from mains and cross mains cables at 90 degrees.

[K.S.]

you know what's sad? due to "i don't have enough time to read them (new posts) all" i almost missed this gem of a thread regarding information value. just wondered why a "newbie success story" kept popping up with new posts and took a look around ;-)

i just keep wondering how sub is keeping up with the pace here? has he cloned himself? invented a time machine?

as an example of what you could do with cables: i once needed a 5 meter (that's 15 feet for the non-metric system guys out there ;-) vga cable and didn't want to spend the money to buy a "very long, extra shieded, mumbo jumbo vga extension" so i took a short vga cable & 5 meter cat5 (had them both at home, so no money spent there), teared them apart and tapped them without even soldering. you would be amazed about the picture quality, problems have only been caused by interference sources at the tapped points...