
Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic) - cwan
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-rip1/
======
Sam_Odio
Even better: An electromagnetically shielded, gold plated _optical_ audio
cable. Sold at Sears [1].

I stopped buying cables retail a long time ago. My favorite supplier: RiteAV.
They're (IMHO) the Amazon of cables. Huge selection, modest prices [2], and
great customer service [3].

1\.
[http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05750807000P?vName=...](http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05750807000P?vName=Computers%20&%20Electronics&cName=ElectronicsAccessories&sName=Home%20Theater%20&%20Audio&psid=FROOGLE01&sid=IDx20070921x00003a)

2\. HDMI cables start at $3.50 - [http://www.riteav.com/hdmi-
cables-c-141_147.html?osCsid=cjmg...](http://www.riteav.com/hdmi-
cables-c-141_147.html?osCsid=cjmg54j8h357b3jp3hn1qn68k2)

3\. I've never seen another retailer with as high a satisfaction rating:
<http://www.resellerratings.com/store/RiteAV>

~~~
Pahalial
Not to knock your suggestion, but I've had similarly great experiences with
<http://monoprice.com> . It seems similar to RiteAV, but much bigger and their
prices seem on par (maybe 6-10 cents more expensive):

<http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Monoprice>

Marginally higher rating, but more importantly a MUCH larger sample size (2338
lifetime reviews vs. 25)

Also, as someone north of the border they do ship here, whereas (as far as I
can tell) RiteAV doesn't.

~~~
chaosmachine
Monoprice also sells really cheap mini displayport adapters. They even sell a
mini displayport to hdmi adapter (you can't get one from Apple).

------
micks56
My patience for the line, "It is digital. It either works or it doesn't" ended
a long time ago.

"Digital" signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are
restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold
there is a gray area where you can't really tell whether your signal will be
interpreted as 1 or 0.

I am not defending the need for high-end HDMI cables. But saying "It's digital
so don't worry" is wrong.

There are reasons that "digital" cables use twisted pair. Wow, even some
"digital" cable standards specify the number of twists per inch required for
reliable operation. And wow, some cable standards even specify shielded cable
is required. I wonder why.

Here is a fun exercise for those that think "digital" signals don't need
engineering steps to protect signal integrity: build all of your cables (or
PCBs for that matter) with straight signals and you will have an excellent
time trying to debug why your communications don't work. Bonus fun for making
the cable length 1/4 of your signal wavelength.

~~~
matwood
I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus
analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting
better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable
it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more
expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s
made it from the source to the destination or they didn't.

No one is claiming that there isn't engineering that needs to happen to make a
digital signal reliably travel from the source to the receiver.

~~~
micks56
I think your understanding of cables is off.

All signals are analog. Every single one. (Actually, I take that back. With
the exception of quantum computers, to date, all signals are analog).

A "digital" cable doesn't just work or not work. It is possible to receive
spurious bit errors for many reasons. For example, you turn up the volume to
your awesome surround sound speakers, which causes more current to flow
through your speaker wires that happen to be running parallel to your horrible
HDMI cable. The increased current causes interference in your low-power HDMI
cable, causing bit errors in the transmission.

~~~
axod
>> "It is possible to receive spurious bit errors for many reasons."

Surely that's why there's error correction layered on top?

Instead of arguing about what _might_ happen, why not find an HDMI device
that'll show you how many unrecoverable bit errors it has detected in the
stream... Can't be that hard to do.

If my hard disk can send data over a tiny crappy unshielded cheap USB cable
without a single bit error, I'd be willing to bet money that an HDMI cable
isn't that much different.

~~~
tedunangst
HDMI doesn't do error correction for video.

------
andrewcaito
I'm reminded of an incident a few years back when Monster sent a cease and
desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable. The CEO wrote them a response that was
pretty well publicized: [http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs-
on-monst...](http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs-on-monster-
cable-patent-suit-vows-to-fight-to-bloody-death)

I bought some cables from <http://www.bluejeanscable.com/> a few months later.
I needed to make a few longer than normal runs, and they had reasonable prices
and were direct about the capabilities of their different products outside of
spec.

~~~
gridspy
Awesome rebuttal by Blue Jeans. I wanted to fist pump at the end.

------
mansr
There's a bit more to it than that. An HDMI cable contains three serial data
links, each operating at roughly 1.5Gbps. At rates that high, some shielding
is required, or the cable will pick up enough noise to damage the signal. The
HDMI link has some error correction (contrary to a comment on that site)
whereby 8 data bits are transmitted using 10 bits on the wire, so minor errors
are tolerated.

The important thing, and the central argument of that article, is that with a
digital link, once there are no bit errors, no further improvements can be
made, and even a cheap cable is plenty good enough for a short HDMI
connection. Gold-plated connectors are still a good idea. Corrosion is as much
of a problem there as anywhere.

Should you use a truly awful cable, and those do exist, you will probably
notice an occasional "spark" on the display.

------
keefe
The graphic is totally useless, the same information could have been conveyed
in 30 lines of text. An "infographic" should have some kind of graph or chart
or something that adds insight, not a picture of 9 playstations and a dopey
flow chart.

~~~
brown9-2
What is wrong with conveying those 30 lines of text visually like this graphic
does?

Perhaps some people will respond better to the same information in this format
as opposed to pure lines of text.

------
gstar
Shame! I thought we were going to get analytics from Mint showing their users
net worth closely correlated with purchasing low-price HDMI cables.

~~~
cake
I was expecting some comparaison of the renewal interval from users buying
cheap cables vs users buying expensive cables.

------
edd
How can companies still get away with not shipping these cables in the box
with displays?

~~~
jerf
Second order effects, of course. If Samsung ships a cheap HDMI cable in the
box, it's very little skin off their nose; they raise the price by their cost,
about $2, and even in the competitive TV market that's probably absorbable to
some extent.

But what happens next? They ship their TV to Best Buy, who quickly notices the
TV ships with an HDMI cable, "robbing" them of the chance to sell a Monster
cable. Or worse, the customer might still buy one, get them both home, notice
there's no difference (or at least no $400 difference) and return the Monster
cable. Ack! That's a $100+ profit opportunity that Samsung is costing them.
How will Best Buy make up for it? They're going to jack the price of the
Samsung TV up by some fraction of the $138 that they can no longer make. Not
necessarily the whole amount, it would be prorated based on the average rate
of Monster purchase; Best Buy has its own problems if it jacks the price of a
TV up as it is a competitive market for them, too!

In fact, it is so competitive that it is not hard to imagine that Best Buy
will discover they can't effectively sell that TV for ~$50 more (guessing) and
just plain take it off the market. I am _not_ saying this is inevitable, just
that it is definitely a very possible outcome. If they don't, the very-price-
sensitive American consumers will certainly notice the price difference in
sufficient numbers to reduce sales of that TV.

So, how does this feed back to Samsung? They put in an HDMI cable, and either
their retails sales drop, or Best Buy even entirely drops their TV.

So, whose fault is this? Money grubbing Samsung? Money grubbing Best Buy?
Well, the capitalistic model tends to assume that the customer is informed,
and when the customer is not informed, they can be scammed. Here, the
customers are not informed. So I split the blame between Monster, who are
aggressively lying to customers, and the customer base itself. (Best Buy to
some extent here too, for the same reasons as Monster.) Not one, not the
other, both. Too many audio/videophiles will aggressively defend their
purchase of expensive cables, even after it is explained that their
justification is technical gibberish, and as the market leaders they deserve
some of the blame.

The other reason I blame this is that if you resolve the problem that a
critical mass of customers actually believes expensive cables work, the
problems go away. Best Buy raises the prices of _all_ TVs a bit to make up the
profit margin, as do all similar retailers. (Most are working on single-digit
% profit margins from the top corporate POV, so if they lose something like
the Monster cable they _will_ need to make it up elsewhere.) Customers don't
even notice because TVs continue to work like computers with constant price
drops, so it manifests as a brief interruption in otherwise-falling prices
rather than a huge, visible increase. Samsung starts sticking cheap-but-
effective cables in, and instead of being punished by the retailers, customers
reward them with happy thoughts about good service and a good out-of-box
experience (which are hard to quantify but certainly produce bankable assets
in the end).

The other option: When buying a TV through a different channel where there
isn't a good Monster upsell opportunity, perhaps something like Amazon (which
still has the upsell opportunity in some sense, but will present customers
with many 1-star reviews and give them a chance to become informed properly),
ship an HDMI cable then.

Second order effects, second order effects, second order effects. Always think
second order effects when thinking about economics. It's never the simple
story, the economic entities _react_ to each other.

~~~
stavrianos
So, when I buy a TV, it's effectively being subsidized by other people's cable
purchases.

~~~
jerf
Assuming my discussion above is correct, which is a big assumption, yes.

One of the other consequences of misinformed consumers is sometimes merely
being an informed consumer allows you to sponge off a bit of value from the
uninformed ones too. See also "being in the small fraction of people that turn
in their rebates"; everybody bought based on the advertised price, but only
you and a few others paid it. (If you're like me, you properly factor in time-
to-prepare-rebate and risk-of-no-return, though I personally have had very
good success. I don't bother with $2 rebates; take out the stamp, the time,
the risk of missing it, and you end up with little or possibly even negative.
But I've scored $50 rebates for things I might have paid full price for
willingly anyhow. That's a win.)

------
matclayton
The Reason to buy a really expensive HDMI Cable.

There is only one "good" (dubious) reason to by a really expensive cable, and
that is for range. There is a performance differences between the cheap and
gold cables, due to the different conductivities. However over short distance
this isn't observable, as the receiver will correctly interpret the digital
signal even though there is no noise on the line, this is the beauty of
digital signals. It is there or it isn't, and with decent ECC on the line,
which I'm assuming HDMI has, even with a fair bit of degradation it wont be an
issue.

However as you extend the cable the signal with degrade at a different rate
depending on the quality of the cable, and eventually you will reach a
distance where the digital signal even with ECC is lost, and it will no longer
work. With a higher quality cable this range is greater, (we are talking of
ranges in the 10's -> 100's of meters), certainly no issue for a normal TV
setup, and you would have to question why you even needed such a long cable to
start with, move your source/receiver closer to each other.

The only other factor which might show up is the sensitivity and power of the
transceivers, and you might find a cable of 100m works on some gear and not on
others, but if you do you really are using the wrong tool for the job, go buy
a optical repeater :)

I'm guessing on distances here, but you get the idea, I use to work in high
frequency data transmission systems, and have no idea of the detailed specs of
HDMI but should give you an idea.

------
singer
Monoprice.com. That is all.

~~~
joezydeco
Except when you're buying a new TV and you're at the checkout, you realize you
need a cable to finish your hookup. _This_ is why you never see a $10 cable in
a retail store, like the poster above mentioned.

It's all about the psychology of needing it now instead of being able to wait
4 more days.

~~~
mrcharles
This is why you use monoprice.com. Every time you need a cable, you actually
order 4. It's still 1/4 the price of buying it from a retail store, and then
when a friend needs a cable for that new tv he just bought, you can hand him
one, for 1/4 the price of what he'd pay in stores, and he thanks you, AND
you've just paid for your own cables.

Really, just don't ever buy a cable in a store. Ever. Getting a TV? Plan it
ahead of time. Buying new tech? Make sure you have the cables already.

We're talking about an average 20x price markup on these cables, and sometimes
significantly more (network cables I'm looking at you!).

Knowing your options is the first step in not getting screwed.

~~~
dpcan
The original poster is precisely correct from my experience.

The only time I purchased a cable online was when I bought someone a gift that
required the HD cable.

All the other times, we ran around the corner to Shopko and paid whatever
their price was because we had a new HD system setup and wanted it in HD. Now.

I really don't think it's a casual purchase for most people, and I certainly
never considered buying more than one at a time.

~~~
Frazzydee
Also, when you're buying a $3,000 TV, $100 for the cables doesn't seem that
bad, relatively speaking.

~~~
Psyonic
And when you've paid $150 dollars for a disneyland park hopper pass, that $12
slice of pizza and small soda doesn't seem that bad either, but you're still
being taken to the cleaners.

------
smackfu
It's rare to see even a $10 one at retail. Often the lowest priced one is
$20-25, and there are a bunch of $40 options. And not even talking about
Monster which this article is singling out.

~~~
JshWright
[http://sellout.woot.com/?ts=1270026281&sig=b28b38ff5dc15...](http://sellout.woot.com/?ts=1270026281&sig=b28b38ff5dc158bf)

$9.99, shipped.

~~~
smackfu
The key word was "retail". Like if I need a cable today.

------
corysama
I've read exactly one semi-scientific comparison of popular DVI cables of
varying price. Amazingly, the conclusion was that Monster Cables really are
better. However the difference had no effect unless you were running a high-
bandwidth signal (>=1920x1080x60Hz) over a long distance (>=12 feet? I don't
recall exactly). The cheaper long cables would work for low bandwidth signals,
but would lose sync and fail at high rez.

Either way: monoprice.com

------
ck2
I suspect Monster has it in their catalog for government contract fulfillment
where they can just drop it in without any review of cost when A/V components
are ordered (seriously).

It's not aimed at people who actually look at price tags.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Have you ever gone into a Best Buy or similar and seen the cable selection?
The "cheap" cables are $50, and the Monster cables are sold right beside them.
Many people compare prices on the TV before coming into the store, but are not
armed with good information when the salesperson tells them that their $1200
TV is worthless without $250 in cables.

~~~
ck2
It's more insidious at a Best Buy where large purchases like HDTV with
accessories are often financed and the salesperson says they can have the best
without paying for it (right now).

The average consumer has no clue and doesn't want to learn that digital is
digital, not like analog. All they know is when there is poor signal they get
nothing on their TV (or blocky) where on their old TV they at least got a
viewable picture with noise.

------
coverband
So what if some dude with extra money pays a premium for a brand name? If it
wasn't for them helping with the profits, Best Buy wouldn't be able to sell us
a $400 dollar dual core laptop at a razor thin margin.

------
carterschonwald
An excellent place for purchasing av and other sorts of cables at sane prices
is monoprice.com Ive been very happy with the pricing which is consistently
the lowest I've seen and the construction quality both. Sanely priced does not
imply any loss in construction quality nor does the contrapositive hold,
though US consumers are conditioned to view price as a signalling mechanism
for quality to various extents

------
mawhidby
I get all my cables from Amazon. They always have a 6-foot HDMI cable for
about $3, with free shipping.

Here's a link:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002L5R78/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002L5R78/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-
top-
stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B0001IXUDK&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0AA7M0DZV2FKQC1G6HTF)

------
teeja
Unless you know exactly why you need the expensive one, you don't need it.

Unless a reasonable-length cable is damaged or malconstructed in such a way
that it distorts transmitted waveforms so much that they're not recoverable,
any reasonable conductor will work. This stuff isn't rocket science since
about a year after RS232 was invented.

------
Groxx
My personal favorite store to get cables from: Fleet Farm.

Typically, you can find almost any kind of cable for $5-$10, some of the
common ones for less. I think my 25-foot flat ethernet cable came in at a
whopping $12, but it's been the most durable I've owned.

They've also got rational pants, which my wife in particular likes.

------
vital101
I always thought that the "high end" cable market was a rip-off. Even as
someone who loves high quality audio, its REALLY hard to tell the difference
between a moderately priced cable and a high end one.

~~~
thmz
Wiki page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-end_audio_cables> There is a
nice quote on it: "no other product is as shrouded in hype and mystery as the
audio cable!"

I also like high quality audio. But most of the time just a good thick
electric copper cable will do the job. Also saves you a lot of $.

~~~
wmf
The idea of basing expensive audiophile equipment on unbalanced audio seems
silly; if they _really_ cared about quality, wouldn't they be using balanced
signaling?

------
samlittlewood
A possibly apocryphal story about Quad using a surprising source of speaker
cables:

<http://www.zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1464>

