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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating :  - Monstrously inflated price, not justified by functionality
Some salesperson insisted that I bought one of these "for the quality". "It's worth every penny" he said. "Try it and you will see" he said. So, I did, after making sure that the store was going to allow me to return it for a cash refund, no questions asked.
I took this super-expensive wire home, I replaced the existing free HDMI wire that came with the satellite receiver and was connecting it to the TV with the Monster and... I saw no difference. Then, I unplugged the five-dollar HDMI wire that connected my Blu-ray player to the TV and plugged the Monster in its place and... I saw no difference. I returned this item to the store and decided to keep using my super-cheap or free HDMI cables because there is absolutely no difference between a five-dollar wire or a cheap-looking free wire that comes with some device that you buy and this expensive cable.
HDMI is all-digital for both sound and picture. As such, it either works or it doesn't. There's really nothing in-between. If a claim is made that thd Monster is 'more reliable' or that it 'lasts longer', I can't see how such claim can be backed - does the fifty-dollar cable last 10 times longer than than the five-dollar cable? I've been using inexpensive HDMI cables for 1-2 years already and none of them has failed me yet. As for 'the looks', they are not important? I plug my cables in the back of things and, hopefully, I don't need to see them very often.
By the way, I don't challenge the claim of high quality for this cable. It looks well built. However, it is quality not needed and, in my view, not worth paying for. The way most of us use cables is: we plug them at the back of our electronic boxes and, if they work on day one they are likely to work in the exact same fashion on day 1000 because they are not going to be subjected to any physical or thermal stress and the materials used to build them are not degradable. While 'quality' was important for analog cables cable where a good quality cable make all the difference in the world, the digital wires either transmit the digits or they don't. If they do, they all work the same, the $1 HDMI cable gives you the exact same 'performance' the $100, gold-plated cable does.
The claims made that these expensive wires allow more Gigabytes of data to pass through may be true but they are irrelevant. The HDMI is a published standard and there is a minimum data throughput that must be supported. If it is, then the device is HDMI compliant. If some cable exceeds the specified throughput, it's nice but it's irrelevant because no electronic component that's HDMI compliant would attempt to push more bytes through the wire than the standard specifies because if they did, they'd violate the specs and would not sell very well. If your electronic component had an HDMI port that called for an HDMI cable that exceeded the HDMI published standards, then it would no longer be called an HDMI port but a proprietary, non-standard solution. + See Full Customer Review |  |
