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

Shall I go first?

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.

Doesn't that contravene some law? Selling them is one thing but that's a completely false statement.

I bought a HDMI lead off E-bay for £6.99 inc. p&p. Picture and sound are perfect.

Only a 100 quid for a HDMI lead cheapskates!

http://www.russandrews.com/lookup/1/...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/...rKord-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???

let's get real here

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)

Monster and Russ Andrews cables can be as excellent as they like, they may well be. The point is, you only need one which is good enough, it does not need to be excellent. If it works, it's good enough, and on short lengths, some flea bitten piece of junk on fleabay is going to give identical results.

Do you think Comet would sell me a Monster USB cable so that colour photos from my printer would have deeper and better colours?

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?

All true - if you're talking about analogue cables.


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".

Yes, let's...


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.

But this only works if you use their Kimber speaker cable.

2 runs for £10k

http://www.russandrews.com/lookup/1/...cable-3360.htm

I'm in the wrong business

I like the way Russ Andrews in their reply to the ASA complaint said...


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?

Waste of well earned cash! Only fools would pay extortionate prices for digital cables!

Get a grip with reality! Are you watching the display panel or the programme 'displayed' on the panel!

Thanks for the replys guys,

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.

I don't dispute that. However that was not what I was on about. If a single listener listening to two different bits of kit can perceive a genuine difference between them then it has to be measurable.

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.

The only HDMI cable I've seen that might be worth paying a bit extra for is a one that panasonic make because it has this handy right angle do-hicky which could mean less stress on the connection if your screen is wall mounted.

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.

As for an earlier question about buying a high priced printer cable for 'better colour prints' - well actually Belkin (and others) already offer stupidly overpriced usb cables, network cables, dialup modem cables (yes, gold plated 56k modem cables!)and every other conceivable cable you might want.... not to mention gold plated optical cables (hmmmmm)

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!

You're dead right on the profit margins. But we do need to make a living, stay in business, so what's a man to do? Trying to steer the right course in this load of muck is quite hard.

Oh yes!

Or selling vacuum cleaners and bags, you make sod all on the cleaner, but a decent margin on the bags and belts.

The Mk 1 Human Earhole is indeed a fine instrument and an essential part of any decent sound engineers toolbox. But is in no way perfect.

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% 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! )