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monster HDMI leads from comet are they any good
satone
Posts: 350 Forum Member
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I was in comet today looking at the HD freesat receivers and they had a a4 paper size sign which said you need to buy a monster HDMI lead to get the best picture quality from freesat,
What do you guys think of this is this a con the lead they want to sell is £100 and also when i was browsing the freesat receivers in comet the sales guy asked me if i needed any help and i asked him about the hdmi leads and he said the monster hdmi leads are the best
What do you guys think of this is this a con the lead they want to sell is £100 and also when i was browsing the freesat receivers in comet the sales guy asked me if i needed any help and i asked him about the hdmi leads and he said the monster hdmi leads are the best
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Don't believe a word of it. To put it mildly
It's a complete con - a cheap HDMI lead is just as good as an expensive one.
Comet want to sell you the lead as they make a HUGE profit on it, only a few quid profit on the Freesat box - but probably £80-£90 profit on the stupidly priced lead.
Also NEVER buy anything called 'Monster' it's vastly overpriced rubbish.
http://www.russandrews.com/lookup/1/region/UK/currency/GBP/customer_id/PAA1484109808277WQNREJTQJXXFYMMT/product-KIMBER-HD-29-HDMI-cable-2729.htm
200 quid for just a half metre lead!
Now if you really have opened up your skull and removed the last vestige of common sense from your brain you could always waste a few quid on one of these....
http://www.russandrews.com/lookup/1/region/UK/currency/GBP/customer_id/PAA1484109808277WQNREJTQJXXFYMMT/product-The-Silver-Signature-PowerKord-1549.htm
£2,750 for a fricking mains lead!
And if you want a real laugh click on the Specifications tab and then the information link about the cryogenic treatment. Are these guys really serious or are they secretly extracting the urine and laughing (very loudly) all the way to the bank???
With 98% of audio connects, a better quality cable equals better. Sound visuals - FACT. However for some reason with hdmi cables, the improvement is only subtle. Try experimenting with cheaper cables and if these offer the quality you are after, then stick with that.
Ps russ andrew cables are excellent - but pricey !
We were ...
The kings new clothes have been seen thru HERE too
Could that be something to do with the signal being digital, do you think ?
Funny how they have latched on to HDMI leads, surely theres a massive market out there for vastly overpriced USB leads - someone missed a boat there !
Fools & their money easily parted
(but its their money at the end of the day)
Or maybe I could replace the memory card slot on my PC with a gold-plated one - that would improve the colours of my photos as I copy them off my memory card wouldn't it?
The improvement won't be "subtle", the leads will work or they won't.
If you genuinely believe you're seeing a difference PQ with different HDMI leads then good for you, but you might want to look up "placebo effect".
And you have the double-blind ABX tests to prove it, presumably? Thought not.
There are no "good" cables. There are only cables that meet the required specification, and those that do not - FACT.
Please explain how the digital bits that constitute the signal can be selectively manipulated so as to yield any improvement, subtle or not, once the cable is of sufficient quality to avoid data loss. Deeper blacks, for example. How would that work?
Excellent in their ability to part the gullible from their money, as in the £2745 kettle lead alluded to in an earlier post.
2 runs for £10k
http://www.russandrews.com/lookup/1/region/UK/currency/GBP/customer_id/PAA1484109808277WQNREJTQJXXFYMMT/product-KIMBER-Select-KS-3038-speaker-cable-3360.htm
I'm in the wrong business :eek:
Errrrrr right. I would agree that what one person thinks is a good sound may not be what someone else thinks. So in that respect sound quality is subjective.
But. If there is a noticable difference in sound between two bits of wire then it has to be measurable. If it sounds different then there have to be differences in the air vibrations that are making the noise. So those differences have to be quantifable (or however you spell it
Which also means that one can measure differences in the electrical voltages in the leads or amplification equipment. If the sound is different then these voltages must be different. To suggest that two identical patterns of voltage in the same equipment can produce two different noises is beyond any logic. Therefore if you claim an effect it has to be measurable.
Or is that too obvious/sensible?
Get a grip with reality! Are you watching the display panel or the programme 'displayed' on the panel!
Also forgot to say also on the sign in comet it said that no freesat receivers come with hdmi cables at all i thought the humax foxsat-hd comes with a hdmi cable well mine did,
If you want to take a look at the sign it was in comet in newport south wales
But you've answered you own question - no to people hear a sound exactly the same, so what sounds good to bad to one person won't necessarily sound as good or as bad to someone else.
In the end I fell that as long as people are happy with what they've purchased, it's no one else's business how much they paid to get what they're happy with.
As to the OP, as long as the cable is capable of carrying the digital signal error free, the price of the cable will make absolutely no difference to the output. The only area I would pay attention to is the quality of the connectors, as a poor quality connection can cause excessive attenuation which could cause errors. Although if the error count is low, the equipment error checking will probably cope with it and it wouldn't be noticeable.
If you read the full text that the quote was taken from then you'll see that objective measurement is something I doubt Russ Andrews believes in! The whole basis of the claims made for this kit seems to veer towards the magic fairy dust end of the spectrum rather than any basis in the real world.
I'd agree that the difference has to be measurable, but are the measuring instruments used good enough to measure the differences?
The human ear/brain is pretty good, probably better than any microphone and oscilloscope or spectrum analyser. It's also easily fooled.
In the past, I've done quite a lot of subjective testing of analogue cables - interconnects and speaker cables. I know that I can hear differences, and I know what I prefer. Sometimes the cheap stuff sounds better, so it can't all be "in the mind".
It's also possible that some of these auditory improvements are actually distortions of the original signal - even if you could measure them, better might sound worse.
This all really only applies to analogue signals, as many have said. Digital is digital. Here, any deficiency in the cable should be easily measured, and immediately obvious as a defect.
Selling a flashy cable for £20 probably yields a profit of £5 to £15 for the retailer compared to selling a £20 radio and making £2 profit, eh Nigel!
Oh yes!
Or selling vacuum cleaners and bags, you make sod all on the cleaner, but a decent margin on the bags and belts.
And you have obviously never used professional test gear if you query whether the test gear is good enough. I use test gear that can measure to an accuracy of under 0.1dB and fractions of a percent distortion. And noise virtually down to the theoretical limit of an electronic circuit.
Believe me a level change of 0.1dB is all but inaudible. So I would have to say that if you can hear it, you can measure it. Now whether or how these measurements relate directly to the quality of the listening experience is another matter.
Don't forget it is relatively easy to fool the ear/brain. it is after all the basis of perceptual coding techniques as used to encode an mp3 audio file for instance.
If you play two tones with closely spaced frequencies you only hear the louder of the two. The closer they are in frequency the smaller the gap in loudness can be to make the quieter one inaudible.
And if you think about it for a second. A CD track has a bitrate of 1,411,200 bits per second. A mp3 file may be just 128,000 bits per second. So in the encoding process some 1,283,200 bits per second are being discarded, very nearly 91% :eek: But an mp3 doesn't sound as bad as the raw figure would lead you to believe (still pretty crap though which is why I don't own an mp3 player!