Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable

All the big box have insane markups on cables. Why the heck would I pay $200+ bucks for some fancy packaging, when a sub-$10 cable would do just the same. It's digital. It either works or it doesn't. Maaaayybe, the pricey cable has better durability, but I'm not pulling out the cable and putting it back in, with any kind of frequency. Even then, I'd still have to buy 20+ cables from MonoPrice to equal a 'Monster'-type cable. Monorprice FTMFW!

Here's a report regarding HDMI cables from our National News:

 

That's a great letter from the president of Blue Jeans Cable.

I'll never pay a lot for cables, but I will pay for good connectors. I've found spades and bananas from ViaBlue that seem to be well made but are only a fraction of the price of WBT termination.



One of my EE friends (I have an EE degree too) loves to plunk down tons of money on ridiculously priced Audioquest cables. I will never understand why he does this, he knows 99.9% of the mfgr's claims are ridiculous.

 

Cable quality makes a difference with analog signals but not digital. You don't get the same effect from type of electrical interference with digital that you do with analog. If a digital signal drops a packet due to interference it just goes back and get's it again. In analog you would see picture or audio degredation.

The only issue with digital seems to be distance. Over 50ft you need a booster or else you get too many dropped packets. I'm not sure why.

 

It basically comes down to the native resistance of the cable. Yes, coper wires and such are great conductors, but they still do have a small resistance to them. Basically, if your data signal has an amplitude of 5V at the origination point, for every foot of wire that signal travels through that amplitude diminishes by a small fixed amount. Add up 50 feet of wire, and you approach the detection threshold of your receiver, resulting in a lot of dropped packets.

 

Audio signals run at such low bandwidth that even with analog, cable size makes very little difference. The quality of the connector is important to avoid corrosion and broken wires, and for coaxial cables you want a decent shield on the ground, but you certainly don't need cables the size of your thumb for excellent analog audio.

Many digital formats don't retransmit lost data for something as non-critical as audio. Mostly they fill in the missing spot by interpolation. The maximum length of a digital link depends on many factors, including bandwidth, protocol, signal strength, receiver sensitivity, and physical medium. We routinely run digital signals 600 feet over unshielded thin copper at speeds 1000 times that of digital audio without any problems at all.

Tom

 

Hahaha, that's awesome.

I had a friend who was a serious audiophile and he disdained Monster from the very beginning. I recall some twenty years or so ago walking into his "listening room" and seeing a mess of medium gage solid wire snaking all over the place-- the + and - inputs for each speaker were spaced something like an inch or inch and a half apart and wires only crossed at 90 degrees.

He hated Monster cables because the braid sucked up moisture and caused corrosion throughout the cable.