Customers Gleefully Mock Best Buy's $1,095.99 HDMI 369
First time accepted submitter Forthan Red writes "It may be a pricing bot run amok, or a ridiculously over-inflated sense of worth, but Best Buy has been offering an HDMI cable for a whopping $1,095.99 (currently sold out!). While Best Buy seems to be oblivious to the absurdity of this price for a digital cable, those posting customer reviews are not. Enjoy the mockery!" One of my favorites is: "saved a ton of money on a new TV on black Friday and decided to use the extra cash to get the best cable available. At a whopping 3.3 feet in length, this cable is no joke. When all my friends come over to watch football, they always say 'WOW what kind of HDMI cable do you have?' I proudly tell them about my audioquest diamond and its advanced features such as its Dark Gray/Black finish. It is a great conversation piece! Not to mention it fits into my dvd player and tv perfectly."
AudioQuest has been at this for a long time (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't the most overprice audiophile garbage cable company, believe it or not, but they are up there. The funniest to me have always been their power cables. They go all the way up to $7000 for a 6-foot IEC-C13 cable (normal computer cable). As though somehow the hundreds or thousands of miles of copper and aluminium cable (the long haul runs are aluminium, cheaper and stronger) are not the problem but the last 6 feet to your device is.
Monster Cable just overcharges you for regular shit. AudioQuest and others like them invent whole new kinds of bullshit and push the prices in to the stratosphere.
Except this isn't pro cable (Score:5, Informative)
And pro cable doesn't cost that much. The only example of pro quality HDMI cable I know of (remember HDMI is a consumer spec, pros use HD-SDI) is from Belden, sold by Bluejeans cable. It is honestly above and beyond normal cable in that you get more range out of lower gauge wire on account of the tighter tolerances it is built to. We've used it at work for runs that are out of spec since it is cheaper than getting active equalizers.
For all that it is still only $20 for a 3 foot run, and then about $3/foot after that. Not cheap, but still way less than this shit.
Remember with digital signaling there is NO room for any of the voodoo audiophiles like to claim. You can either measure the improvement on a scope or it isn't there. The signal must meet certain specs to work properly and those are easy to measure. So unless they can show better certification ranges, it is bullshit.
Also at 3 feet you don't need anything special. It is such a short distance even regular old cheap Monoprice 28AWG HDMI cable performs flawlessly at high resolutions. It is only with distance that you start to need better tolerances to get the signal through properly. Even then if it gets too far you just convert to fiber, cheaper than trying to build the world's most perfect copper cable.
Amazon sells them cheaper! (Score:0, Informative)
Amazon is selling it for $1.24 cheaper! Whoo!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4
Re:Misplaced decimal? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:4, Informative)
With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.
Most people seem to have speaker wires that make great quarterwave dipole antennas annoyingly near the 15M / 10M / 6M ham radio bands or the 11M CB band. The problem is some classical, lets say, pre 00s audio output final power amps have something of a rectifying effect on the incoming RF. So you end up hearing clearly every trucker who drives by. Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable. Assuming your negative speaker lead either can be grounded, or already is grounded, a couple minutes with a swiss army knife and a length of old antenna / cable tv coaxial cable will either result in a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics, or a nice shielded speaker wire ready to install.
You can also spend some dough on RF ferrite chokes, but frankly its usually cheaper to use scrap cable, assuming you have some laying about.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Informative)
Humor. You don't have it.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're confusing simple shielded cable with coaxial cable. No, you don't need an impedance-matched transmission line at audio frequencies, but shielding CAN be relevant with some amps in some setups. The wavelength of audio frequencies is irrelevant here - speaker cables can be efficient antennae for RF signals, which can then mix with other RF signals and/or be demodulated in the diode junctions that comprise the bi-polar transistors used in the outputs of many amps. This can cause audible artifacts, including hearing radio stations through your speakers even when there's no tuner attached to your system, especially if you're close to the transmitting tower.
As for kilo-buck HDMI cables, that IS an ultimate stupidity. However, you should be careful regarding this whole 'ones and zeros' business. At the frequencies used for HDMI, (and given the rectangular nature of the signals, frequency response up to ten times the fundamental may be important), you're basically back in the analog realm, with rise times a significant fraction of the total waveform period. Impedance mismatches, slowed waveform edges, and extraneous interference can cause jitter and increase bit error rate, and although you're unlikely to see the difference in a typical home setup, these errors can add up over multiple generations of signal transfer.
So no, there won't be any visible or audible difference between a 10 dollar HDMI cable and a thousand dollar one. Just be aware that you can't stick any old cable in there and expect good results.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:4, Informative)
Any reasonably thick lamp cord will do just fine as a speaker cable.
Go to your local home improvement store, locate the "12 volt outdoor garden lighting" area, assuming solar hasn't wiped these guys out, you can sometimes pick up off the shelf spools of really cheap heavy gauge stranded two conductor wire.
Theoretically, buying by the foot outta the electricians aisle should be cheaper, however, during one of the commodity boom/runups they were updating the price of the electricians aisle by-the-foot on a seemingly daily basis, but they never updated the price on the pre-printed spools of garden lighting wire. So I was paying maybe 10% over pre-boom per foot price for the garden wire, but I was cool with that because pay-by-the-foot had doubled or tripled and the pre-pack garden wire had not been marked up yet.
For something like the cost of an old fashioned DVD I wired up my whole 5.1 speaker system using garden wire. If I had used "best buy marked up cable prices" it probably would have cost $200 to buy all that wire.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Informative)
Denon makes the AKDL1 link cable a Cable [amazon.com] that's listed for $10,000; a RJ45/8P8C patch cable, and there are reviewers who swear it's faster, really...
So I guess no... a $1000 cable isn't really any better; to get the real goods you need $10,000 for a cable.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Informative)
Humor. You don't have it.
OK I admit to posting a sarcastic response as well, but I think there is an inherent communications flaw based on the programming and design skills of the Slashcode team.
When Timbo replied to a post, "Can't tell if troll or not.", he was actually replying to a post that most people will not see because it is at negative 1. This post in particular:
There are many uses for cables that really are perfect quality, made with best parts and are harder and more professional than your usual home cables. Usually they are required in production environments, not for your home HDTV. Same is true for video as in this case, but also audio. The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for professional work.
To the casual reader, it looks like Timbo is replying to this post:
Yes, how dare you philistines mock the $1,095 HDMI cable? The zeros and ones are so much sharper and clearer than the zeros and ones transmitted over cheap cable.
Hence the confusion. Timbo may not be as simple-of-mind as the slashdot coders would have you believe.
Re:Misplaced decimal? (Score:5, Informative)
That, and amazon [amazon.com] also sells them for a equally idiotic price.
Re:No, often not (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.
You're generally speaking correct, but more correct if you're exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel. Cut off at $2.50 and you're good. $0.25 is like trying to use a 70s era lm741 as your preamp, with a lm386 as speaker driver.
It still boggles the mind that in 2011 there are "home hobbiest" types using LM386 chips as an audio amp, they're nice and cheap like your 25 cents but they whoosh out white noise into headphones like a trip to a seashore. There's better lower noise stuff so you don't have to hear a constant "ssssh" in your headphones, but thats more like $2.50 not $100. Also the lm386 is a great oscillator as the power voltage sags, like when batteries are getting weak, when the bass response starts sounding whacky you know you should have selected a chip designed after 1980.
Also your $.25 DAC is gonna be like half a really dirt cheap dual DAC and you're going to be lucky to get 40 dB cross channel separation and noise performance is going to be audibly foul, which I suppose is better than most normal humans can hear, although its pretty pitiful as a spec. Again, $2.50 instead of $.25 and you're back into territory where you probably don't have the gear to measure it, much less hear it.
Another classic "cheapie" characteristic is 3rd ord IMD products. You can hear those in heavy bass and I'm no audiophool type. Again, the $2.50 DAC and a $2.50 amp chip designed this century would eliminate the heard and measurable effect.
The market seems to be "$0.25 junk at walmart" or the audiophool class. Not much in between. Although I must say my ipod nano final audio amp is pretty decent with low noise, but some would say i-device = audiophool, well ... whatever.
The standard /. car analogy is modern cars are more reliable than old cars, if you exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel like a yugo or a trabant or whatever China Motors is starting to ship.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Informative)
I'll bring up my analogy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:4, Informative)
When it comes to transmitting analog information, there is a difference in many cables. Even speaker wire (which is analog) makes a difference, depending on quality of copper, gauges used, etc. Most people can't notice the difference, but between "cheap grade" and "good grade" they can. But a HDMI cable is digital. Either the signal is 100% getting there or it isn't. It can't get there "better", like it can with analog information. If a $2 cable transmits the digital signal with no loss, it will sound exactly the same as a $2000 cable, it is impossible to sound "better". Smart people may buy the $20 cable for durability and quality of construction, but can't improve the "sound" of the music like it does with analog. I keep explaining this, and not sure why I would have to so much on a tech website.