Posted on 05/16/2007 3:02:53 PM PDT by george76
High-definition television (HDTV) has evolved from an early-adopter indulgence to a mainstream technology in less than a decade. Enthusiasm for HD everything is driving the sales of flat-panel TVs and has inspired a next-gen DVD format war. It’s showing up in camcorders and on your local TV news.
Yet HDTV remains a widely misunderstood technology, muddled with misconceptions and half-truths born of marketing mumbo jumbo and senseless jargon. The advertised specifications read like bewildering mathematical equations with “variables” such as 1080i, 720p, 4:3, 1080p and 16:9. To clear the air of confusion we’ve examined some of the most wrongheaded bits of received wisdom in the world of HD.
Myth #7 To get the best-quality HD, you need expensive cables.
Fact: Not true. If the cables running from your DVD player or cable box aren’t particularly long, you should be fine with inexpensive video cables. The extra shielding in expensive cables that prevents interference in analog equipment won’t improve the image of digital video through HDMI or DVI cables — the signal either comes through or it doesn’t. And the savings can be huge: 6-ft. HDMI cables range from $20 to $160.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
This leads to robertpaulsen's Myth #11: You can receive them with the tuner in your HDTV set or an external DTV set-top receiver, but you need an external HD antenna.
You do not need external HD antenna. Your existing analog antenna is just fine.
There is nothing I love better then telling clerks to take their monster cables and shove them where the sun don’t shine VBG
But Sir they are gold plated, Yeah right you can still shove them other cables work just as well you idiot. Really jerks them off especially those working on commissions.
This is absolutely true. For short runs you can use the cheapest available wire for speakers and you will be just fine.
For longer runs you have to be a little careful. The reason is that the resistive losses in long cable runs are frequency dependent and so this will effect the frequency response you get from your high end speakers. So as the runs get longer you have to go to bigger wire. Do a Google search for guidance.
For digital signals like HDMI you need to go to heavier duty and therefore more expensive cables as the runs get longer. You can find guidelines for this on the net also.
But as far as I'm concerned 80% of the bucks spent on Monster Cables is for "Pride of Ownership" and "Bragging Rights" and not performance. Monster Cable is the most over-hyped brand in the audio world.
That's a $700 power cord.
One born every minute.
DON't Buy anything from Monstor Cable... save your money and go to www.monoprice.com you won't regret it!
Years ago I gave up on an audiophile magazine called "Stereophile" after they published a long review of speaker cables. These guys were so suggestive they have to be good hypnosis subjects. You would not believe all the nuances on sound they attributed to these cables.
Don't get me started on the cable designs themselves, snake oil and voodoo did not begin to describe them.
Them are some expensive cords, but they’re fiber optic cables I think...
You know the thing that goes into the outlet and carries 120V AC?
When I first heard of them they were about 4K. I could get an online power conditioning UPS for less.
This whole &O*W$*@!! HD player scam has almost nothing to do with the technology, but rather it's a sufficiently-bullet-proof toll both to be used by the Hollywood types to extract more money from movie lovers.
One doesn't need HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Discs (BD)to get exquisite HD. As Peter Putnam said, whole movies in the same quality as BD/HD-DVD will fit onto home burnt DVDs. Two thirds of such movies would probably require a commercially-pressed DVD9, but the point is, it could all be made to work within existing technology, but no, that's not good enough for the Hollywood types. They know their DVD encryption scheme was broken, and since they can afford new, bulletproof toys, they'll use our desire for first-run movies to make us buy such devices, so their wallets will continue to get fatter.
The Chinese EVDs are backward-compatible with standard DVDs, yet are set to deliver HD also. If that standard were licensed to deliver HD content (but it won't, except perhaps by the also-rans), people could see the cost of HD everywhere plummet. By contrast, if BD or HD-DVD are allowed to become predominant, prices to the consumer will stay high, with people being herded like cattle to buy whole new, expensive sets of these new-fangled disks and players.
Those new players are the mechanism Hollywood will use to redefine ownership of intellectual property, which they've already done to a large extent, through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which has turned Susie Homemaker and Ferris CollegeStudent into criminals. You no longer own your DVDs. Though it's entirely technicaly feasible for you to protect your DVD purchases and your media library's potential obsolescence, deterioration, and accidental surface damage, you've been made a criminal if you try to make an archival copy of something you thought you owned. To enforce these extensions against the Fair Use Doctrine, Hollywood, using taxpayer money has enlisted Big Brother Gubmint to go to bat for them and be their very own cops.
Meanwhile, you're not being told that every customer-desirable quality that BD and HD-DVD can deliver could also be delivered on media and players costing far less, at nearly the same price as current DVD players.
If consumers want to buy again their favorite movies in a new format, great! More power to 'em. For the rest of us, DVDs are still a very robust medium that can deliver the best quality technology has to offer.
The BD / HD-DVD War? A pox on both their greedy houses! Fleeting empowerment of consumers by offering them a "Count Chocula versus Frankenberry" choice distracts from the fact that either way, the same manufacturer gets your money and you get the expensive sugar.
HF
Oh I see, they’re special cables for the inside, not just plugging into the wall, they looked like optics...interesting article on them at that link..
Big Deal...My ears were ruined by too much ELO in college...the iPod even sounds good these days...
The pinged subjects will be those of HDTV technology, satellite/cable tv, HD, OTA (over the air with various roof top and indoor antennas) HD reception. Broadcast specials and any and all subjects relating to HD.
Lasvegasdave
Yipes! I didn't mention cables...!
Thanks for the ping
They actually do and until you come over to my house and make a comparison listening to prove your point, I stand on my statement. /sarc
USEnet?
Hitler!
/Godwin done, thread over
;-)
>>The point about not buying expensive cables applies to all Home Theater...
>>I wonder how the folks at Monster Cable can sleep at night - a whole business built on a scam.
Worth saying again.
Great site that debunks a lot of the myths about speaker wire, that folks like Monster have put out there:
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
Great site for cables of all sorts:
http://monoprice.com/home/index.asp
Folks on this thread who deride the hype surrounding high-end cables are partially correct. The wire portion really doesn’t matter for digital, and hardly for analog. But connectors are vitally important for both. A cheesy cheap cable with cheesy cheap connectors might work for six months or two years, but then fretting corrosion, spring-contact fatigue and stuff like that can make for noisy and intermittent connections that can be the very devil to diagnose and can actually damage your expensive equipment.
Gold plated connectors are worth the money in the long run. Certainly, some cable manufacturers are guilty of over-hype, but to totally dismiss the possibility of there being any difference between cables is uninformed, reactionary and short-sighted.
If you think “black mamba” is bad, Google “mpingo discs”.
...and it is only an 8' pair of speaker cables! Wonder what a 10 or 12' foot pair would run? That is as silly as those rare wood-species blocks for lifting the speaker cable off the floor.
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