shetline
06-17-2005, 04:37 PM
If someone told you that a special rhodium-plated, oxygen-free, "time aligned" CAT-5 patch cable placed between your computer and your cable/DSL modem was going to make web pages look sharper and e-mail text easier to read, would you believe them? Would you pay $100/meter for this amazing advance in wire technology? $200/meter? More?
People don't seem to fall for this crap when it comes to computers, even when they don't have much of an understanding of the technology that puts web pages and e-mail up on their displays. Plenty of people fall for something very similar when it comes to audio and video cables for other home electronics, however.
Mystical, magical voodoo wonder wire used to be the sole domain of self-proclaimed golden-eared audiophiles. These are the people who would buy magazines like Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, wherein they could find helpful articles, like how to make CDs sound better by running a green magic market around the edges, along with "reviews" of the many and various kinds of hideously overpriced wire, reviews that could literally go on for pages of lurid, wine-snob-like prose comparing the imagined, infinitely subtle differences between Brand A and Brand B.
As the world of audiophilia has shrunk over recent years under the onslaught of home theater, the purveyors of such boutique-brand "interconnects" have branched out into the latter market, and have managed to get the so-called "low-end" of their product lines into the mainstream outlets of consumer electronics, such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Frye's, etc. In fact, reasonably priced alternatives have been largely displaced -- you either buy the overpriced snake oil, or leave the store without cables you might need.
Buying yourself a new DVD player with component video outputs? The salesmen will almost certainly try to convince you that you need their $150+ "special" component video cable to get "full performance".
This is a half-truth. Using component video connections, if your display and DVD player have them, definitely produces a better picture than using S-Video, and much better than olde-fashioned composite video. But it doesn't take $150 dollars to do it right. You can go to Radio Shack and buy an audio/video patch cable for under $20, and even though it's color-coded red, yellow, and white instead of red, green, and blue, it's still three bundled lengths of decent-quality 75-ohm cable, completely up to the task of delivering a great picture.
At least a component video cable carries an analog signal, so if you really stretch for it you might cobble up a few theoretical reasons for one kind of cable to be better than another, based on frequency response, noise rejection, etc. -- not that anyone has ever been able to produce a shred of evidence that real human beings, freed from the power of suggestion and not knowing what brand they're using or its price, can see any differences in quality between various kinds of wiring of this sort, so long as none of it is flat-out defective.
But they're even pulling this BS with all-digital cables. Definitive digital ones and zeros, which pretty much make it through a wire or they don't. There's a phenomenon called "jitter" that one might hang one's hat on when desperately trying to justify price tags that are 10, 20, 30 times more than another product, but that largely-theoretical problem isn't an issue at all if the electronics at either end of a cable are at all competently designed, and the problem is of vanishingly small magnitude in any event.
Apart from this one incredibly overblown issue, expecting a difference in digital cables, outside of outright failure of a defective cable, is just as crazy as thinking that a new cable for your DSL modem is going to make your e-mail easier to read. If you imagine that a boutique brand "digital interconnect" is giving you, for example, "tighter, deeper base" than your old, shamefully pedestrian cable, well, you're doing just that -- imagining.
I bought a new TV recently, and I had to replace an old HDMI-to-DVI cable with an new HDMI-to-HDMI. The cheapest locally-available cable was a $150 Monster Cable. Now, I'll pay a bit extra for convenience and immediate gratification, but I absolutely refuse to spend $150 for a deceptively-sold product, when a little patience gets me something just as good, mail-ordered off the web and delivered a week later -- for only $12.
People don't seem to fall for this crap when it comes to computers, even when they don't have much of an understanding of the technology that puts web pages and e-mail up on their displays. Plenty of people fall for something very similar when it comes to audio and video cables for other home electronics, however.
Mystical, magical voodoo wonder wire used to be the sole domain of self-proclaimed golden-eared audiophiles. These are the people who would buy magazines like Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, wherein they could find helpful articles, like how to make CDs sound better by running a green magic market around the edges, along with "reviews" of the many and various kinds of hideously overpriced wire, reviews that could literally go on for pages of lurid, wine-snob-like prose comparing the imagined, infinitely subtle differences between Brand A and Brand B.
As the world of audiophilia has shrunk over recent years under the onslaught of home theater, the purveyors of such boutique-brand "interconnects" have branched out into the latter market, and have managed to get the so-called "low-end" of their product lines into the mainstream outlets of consumer electronics, such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Frye's, etc. In fact, reasonably priced alternatives have been largely displaced -- you either buy the overpriced snake oil, or leave the store without cables you might need.
Buying yourself a new DVD player with component video outputs? The salesmen will almost certainly try to convince you that you need their $150+ "special" component video cable to get "full performance".
This is a half-truth. Using component video connections, if your display and DVD player have them, definitely produces a better picture than using S-Video, and much better than olde-fashioned composite video. But it doesn't take $150 dollars to do it right. You can go to Radio Shack and buy an audio/video patch cable for under $20, and even though it's color-coded red, yellow, and white instead of red, green, and blue, it's still three bundled lengths of decent-quality 75-ohm cable, completely up to the task of delivering a great picture.
At least a component video cable carries an analog signal, so if you really stretch for it you might cobble up a few theoretical reasons for one kind of cable to be better than another, based on frequency response, noise rejection, etc. -- not that anyone has ever been able to produce a shred of evidence that real human beings, freed from the power of suggestion and not knowing what brand they're using or its price, can see any differences in quality between various kinds of wiring of this sort, so long as none of it is flat-out defective.
But they're even pulling this BS with all-digital cables. Definitive digital ones and zeros, which pretty much make it through a wire or they don't. There's a phenomenon called "jitter" that one might hang one's hat on when desperately trying to justify price tags that are 10, 20, 30 times more than another product, but that largely-theoretical problem isn't an issue at all if the electronics at either end of a cable are at all competently designed, and the problem is of vanishingly small magnitude in any event.
Apart from this one incredibly overblown issue, expecting a difference in digital cables, outside of outright failure of a defective cable, is just as crazy as thinking that a new cable for your DSL modem is going to make your e-mail easier to read. If you imagine that a boutique brand "digital interconnect" is giving you, for example, "tighter, deeper base" than your old, shamefully pedestrian cable, well, you're doing just that -- imagining.
I bought a new TV recently, and I had to replace an old HDMI-to-DVI cable with an new HDMI-to-HDMI. The cheapest locally-available cable was a $150 Monster Cable. Now, I'll pay a bit extra for convenience and immediate gratification, but I absolutely refuse to spend $150 for a deceptively-sold product, when a little patience gets me something just as good, mail-ordered off the web and delivered a week later -- for only $12.