The Economics of HDMI Cables
When you get a Blu-Ray player or an HDTV receiver, if you want to get maximum performance you need to hook it up to your television using an HDMI cable. Meanwhile, HDMI cables come in a huge assortment of prices. Here’s a short one for $3.49 whereas Radio Shack is selling a longer Monster brand cable for over $120. Fortunately for me, my high school physics teachers one day went on an extended tirade about the evils of Monster cables and illustrated the non-superiority between the expensive and cheap version of AV cables.
Alex Tabarrok’s puzzled by the phenomenon:
The second puzzle is, Why don’t any stores stock cheap HDMI cable? I knew cables were a ripoff yet I could not find reasonably priced cables at Best Buy, Radio Shack, Target or even Wal-Mart. Ordinarily, we would expect competition to push prices down but in this case it seem as if the mere existence of Monster is anchoring high prices everywhere but online.
My best guess is that this is an unusually strong version of the hidden fee model of Laibson and Gabaix. In that model, firms overprice one aspect of service–such as a hotel charging exorbitant rates for telephone service–as an idiot tax. Crucially, the idiot tax is matched by an IQ-subsidy; the price of the hotel room is lower than it would be without the idiot tax–so the idiots don’t know to shop elsewhere and the high-IQ types are, in fact, drawn to stores with an idiot tax. Thus, buy your blu-ray player at places such as Best Buy which sell a lot of expensive cable as well as massively overpriced extended warranties.
I think that’s probably an unduly pejorative terminology. He says “ordinarily, we would expect competition to push prices down.” But what that really means is “assuming perfect information we would expect competition to push prices down.” And it’s pretty clear that insofar as accurate information about the relative quality and available price points of HDMI cables spreads, competition will push prices down. But not surprisingly, most people don’t seem to actually have much information about this. So the tax on low-information consumers works. But I don’t think I want to call them “idiots” just for not knowing about this. It happens to be the case that I’m a pretty informed consumer about electronics, but I think it stands to reason that there’s some other field of purchasing endeavor in which I’m regularly getting hosed.
The other really egregious example of this is the prices Apple charges for RAM. Identical RAM upgrades can be purchased online for substantially less and installed in the comfort of your own home.
63 Responses to “The Economics of HDMI Cables”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
June 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am
… or you can just get a coat hanger
June 13th, 2009 at 8:47 am
“assuming decent information” is probably sufficient, and having decent information can be a challenge for types of purchases that are relatively infrequent. The costs of acquiring information are real (the availability of posts like this one, and the one at Marginal Revolution, lowers those costs), and if you are amortizing those costs (so to speak) over a single purchase rather than over many repeated purchases, it may not pay to become informed. Of course, that transaction (the internal cost vs benefit one) inevitably looks different in retrospect, especially when one of your nerdy friends says, “why’d you buy that overprice piece of shit? I got mine for next to nothing on Nerdmazon, you really got taken! got any beer?”
June 13th, 2009 at 8:48 am
‘Purchased online’ solves the problem. Walk in stores are idiot magnets when it come to tech.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Thank you Judson@3.
Seriously, have people become incapable of comparison shopping?
As long as buyers suffer from “gotta have it NOW!” they will get ripped off.
And no amount of “knowledge” will prevent that greed.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Okay, an entire posted comment just vanished as it was posting. Is there moderation here?
June 13th, 2009 at 9:35 am
In case there isn’t, the point is that there’s very little profit on the large items which use HDMI connections and therefore big box stores rely upon sales of profitable accessories (and services) to drive their profits. Most of those big, expensive TV’s sell at very low profit margins, and the same goes for audio receivers and blu-ray players, all the items which use HDMI connections.
The big box stores have little incentive to stock cheap, low profit accessories simply because it would be more convenient and cheaper for consumers. In some ways it’s unfortunate (like for me when I’m shopping for some last minute need), but I can’t necessarily disagree with them.
You do have to ask, though, at what point do consumers need to realize that something has to pay for all those storefronts and employees (however inadequate they may seem compared to our fantasy low-paid yet high-quality employees) as well as corporate profits which will be demanded.
CostCo continually gets a lot of flak on Wall Street for proclaiming a policy of 15% profit on all generic items they sell with possibly higher profits on name brands, while paying and compensating their employees well. But so far I haven’t seen a successful example of those giganto-scale economics happening for a high service (i.e., non-warehouse-style) big box store or even a Radio Shack type niche store.
I would recommend a site like “mono” then “price” and then “dot c om”, where you can get good Taiwanese made cables for nearly any configuration and lengths quickly and cheaply. There are many similar sites.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Okay, an entire posted comment just vanished as it was posting. Is there moderation here?
Same problem here — one post in three, more or less, routinely gets eaten. Happening for months, too. If it’s moderation, then the Ancient Mariner is moderating.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I took physics, too, but back in the late 60’s, early 70’s, so “monster cables” are something I never learned about. In those days “electronic equipment” consisted of televisions and radios, and you simply plugged them in the wall with a two prong plug.
So tell me Matt, what are the evils of monstor cables?
June 13th, 2009 at 9:51 am
“And it’s pretty clear that insofar as accurate information about the relative quality and available price points of HDMI cables spreads, competition will push prices down.”
Why on earth would you think this?
Prices already are way down, as you show via links. And at the same time, educated consumer Kevin Drum admits he recently overpaid for an ethernet cable at his local Radio Shack because he wanted it immediately.
Similarly, sometimes I overpay for items at my corner convenience store since they are right on my corner and are open 24 hours. I don’t expect the spread of accurate information to push down the prices at that corner convenience store anymore than I expect Radio Shack to start competing with Amazon on cable pricing.
“The other really egregious example of this is the prices Apple charges for RAM. Identical RAM upgrades can be purchased online for substantially less and installed in the comfort of your own home.”
Well, if comfort is an issue, having Apple install the RAM seems to exceed any possible comfort level achieved by doing it yourself.
Not to mention that if you buy certain of Apple’s products like the Mac Mini, installing RAM will exceed the competency level of the average hobbyist.
For another example of this, see how TiVo charges an extra $300 to sell you a box with a 1TB hard drive in it rather than a 160GB hard drive. The price difference in parts means it costs them about $50 to do what they charge you $300 extra for. But this is smart pricing on TiVo’s part, since they need to capture as much revenue as possible from price-insensitive consumers at the high end of the market while still remaining competitive at the lower end of the market.
If you follow the logic here out to its destination, you can begin to see why airline tickets are priced in the seemingly odd manner that they are.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:10 am
I do think “idiot tax” is perhaps a little harsh, but it is undeniably true that many a business model is built on a foundation of extracting unjustifiable quantities of cash from people who aren’t informed or aren’t paying attention. I just had an experience of this sort with my propane provider. They have a fixed-priced plan, which holds prices constant based on the propane price at a particular point in time, and the floating plan, which, ostensibly, goes up and down with the price of the underlying commodity.
I’d been on the floating plan, and last winter I finally paid enough attention to my bill to notice that I was paying the same price as I had the previous year, even though petroleum prices has fallen by more than half. I called them up and they sort of hemmed and hawed and said “most of our customers use the fixed price plan”. To this I replied “so..you have two plans: the fixed price plan and the plan for stupid people who aren’t paying attention?” They mumbled something like, “Um…er…. would you like us to switch you to the fixed-price plan?” I think it’s probably fair to say I’d been paying a substantial idiot tax in this instance.
By the way, the company was Amerigas. If they’re your provider, check your bill.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:15 am
The auto industry is one of the most egregious industries in this respect. Look at how they package features on their more loaded vehicles.
Want GPS on the dash? Add $1500 when you can get an equal or better unit from Garmin for $300.
Want a DVD player for the rear seat passengers? Add $2500 when you can get a better one installed for $800
and so on.
And a lot of those extra electronics aren’t even factory installed. At least for Japanese cares. They do it at their distribution centers to order.
One could go on and on. How about popcorn and candy pricing at the movie theaters? If I want candy at the theater I’ll stop at the grocery on the way there just out of principal.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I’m a tech writer/critic, and as often as possible in my articles, I talk about the absurdity of Monster Cables. What might surprise you, however, is how much hate mail and negative feedback I receive from people who own and use Monster Cables. Some of them are videophiles who go on and on about electromagnetic shielding and vague, psuedo-scientific justifications for the exorbitant cost, but I think that some of them are regular shoppers who got suckered by a Best Buy salesperson and can’t accept the fact that they made a mistake.
Also, a lot of people simply can’t believe that something cheap can be good. I mean, a Ferrari and a Volvo will both get you from point A to point B, but people still buy Ferraris and spend incredible amounts of money on it, even though the core functionality is identical and any perceived advantages are superficial.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I’m not an expert, so I may be wrong.
But my understanding is that you are not buying the “absolutely identical RAM” as the ram apple puts in computers.
As I understand it, RAM pricing is based on tolerances. Expensive RAM has been tested to very high tolerances. That is, likelihood (or unlikelihood) of defects. Cheap RAM will likely work, and, if it works, will work identically to expensive RAM, but cheap RAM is more likely to be defective or to fail in the future.
I’ve bought cheap RAM over the years and been happy with it. I’ve especially liked the honest RAM description from a few very small suppliers. But I’ve also had the cheap RAM arrive defective or fail, and that’s been a pain. As I understand it, Apple uses expensive, high tolerance RAM.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:25 am
esaud: “Monster” is a brand of mainly power conditioners and wires & cables whose stock in trade is that they claim that their products do all sorts of magical pseudo-scientific things that they cannot, and while their products are fine and good they are not any better than vastly lower priced products made with real world specifications.
The company’s other pastime is suing any company, however unrelated, that has “Monster” in the name, from the makers of clothing to mini-golf parks.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:30 am
“I’m a tech writer/critic, and as often as possible in my articles, I talk about the absurdity of Monster Cables. What might surprise you, however, is how much hate mail and negative feedback I receive from people who own and use Monster Cables. Some of them are videophiles who go on and on about electromagnetic shielding and vague, psuedo-scientific justifications for the exorbitant cost, but I think that some of them are regular shoppers who got suckered by a Best Buy salesperson and can’t accept the fact that they made a mistake.”
Of course, this is pretty a stupid assertion. There certainly are situations where higher quality cables most certainly will deliver higher quality signals. It’s just that an all digital connection like HDMI is not one of those situations.
With analog signals, cable quality really can matter.
You can see the idiocy of the commenter a bit more clearly from his subsequent paragraph:
“Also, a lot of people simply can’t believe that something cheap can be good. I mean, a Ferrari and a Volvo will both get you from point A to point B, but people still buy Ferraris and spend incredible amounts of money on it, even though the core functionality is identical”
The “core functionality” of a Ferrari and a Volvo is “identical”?
Believe it or not, but there actually are situations where you can pay more for higher quality functionality…
June 13th, 2009 at 10:34 am
My bet is that the convenience of picking up the needed cable when you buy your TV outweighs the added cost. It also seems like the absolute amount of the prices is small so consumers don’t worry about it.
If you all enjoyed this discussion, I think you might like reading The Undercover Economist..you’d get a whole book that analyzes prices with these types of arguments. There’s lots of discussion about Starbucks pricing which is fun (especially because he uses the Starbucks at 14th and P in DC as his example and that used to be my local Starbucks
June 13th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Let’s be clear here though. HDMI cables are one thing, other AV cables are another. Cheap RCA type cables do make a difference. This doesn’t mean buy Monster, but that $0.75 cables aren’t as good as $10 ones.
That said, if you paid $250 for you Blu0Ray player and $30 for your movie waiting a week for a cable to arrive to save $10 isn’t high on the list.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:38 am
“while (Monster Cable’s) products are fine and good they are not any better than vastly lower priced products made with real world specifications.”
Again, this is only true in situations like HDMI where an all digital signal is being carried.
With analog cables, cable quality actually can make a real world difference.
Now, Monster’s products even in the analog world tend to be massively over-engineered and massively over-priced, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t functionally better. It just becomes an issue of whether or not the improvement they provide is cost-effective or not for a particular use and user.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:39 am
This has always frustrated me, but I’ve always seen it as more a tax on immediacy/convenience as much as an ‘idiot tax’. If you need it now, it’s probably worth $10 more to get it right now.
That doesn’t explain the ‘Monster Cable’ phenomenon – but I’d be willing to call that a market failure (ie lack of knowledge on one side of the transaction).
I used to wonder why no one carried fairly-priced cabling in stores, but then a few years ago I read a glowing article in some business magazine about Best Buy’s business model. Basically, their entire model is based on making it so certain types of shoppers won’t go there – namely the people that demand a LOT of service and make a lot of returns while being extremely price-conscious. They do it with the extended warranty hyping and charing absurd restocking fees. The people left are the price unconscious/poorly informed who will gobble up extended warranties and high-margin accessories as well as a few well-informed people who will shop for good deals and avoid the high margin items, but also require no store assistance and almost never make returns. The latter group is kind of unavoidable but does have the bonus of having informed consumers shop there, lending the sort of aura of acceptance to the less-informed.
Further, think of it this way, the accessories have the value of being relatively inexpensive. When you’re in a store surrounded by items in the high hundreds to five-figure range – it makes sense a lot of people are less conscious of the difference between paying $5 and $30 on a cable. Even a $120 cable is far less than the difference of two models of televisions the shopper might be looking at. It seems to me shoppers would logically base their shopping decisions on the big ticket item, a trip to another store to save $5 on cables probably doesn’t make sense, so there’s minimal downward pressure on prices except from the Internet, which has a wait time for delivery.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Petey: For myself I wouldn’t suggest that there are no performance differences between measurably low quality cables and measurably high quality cables. I.e., low grade materials, shoddy manufacturing where tips fall off, etc.
The point is that there are no measurable quality of performance differences between cables made well and of the correct materials and similar cables under premium brands.
It is true that the Ferrari / Volvo comparison is not accurate. It’s hard to do a similar analogy, but it would be something like having two Ferraris, one of which has a number of items added on that do not detract from its performance but neither add to it, and then selling that Ferrari for 10x more based on pseudo-scientific claims that performance (rather than cosmetics or name-branding) has been added.
There are in fact loads of quality variations and inconsistencies in performance between HDMI cables, even though it’s an all digital signal, because lots of digital information is dropped and simply compensated for by the processors in the display or audio device. In addition, many devices and cables cause other problems by failing to supply the low voltage power signal sent over the cable. However, these quality differences don’t correspond to the price or name brand of the HDMI cable, and actual cable performance testing is extremely limited, mostly to the basics of minimal certification for the HDMI organization.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Don’t HDMI cables eliminate other cables? How much does it cost to buy 3-4 separate cables vs one HDMI? Isn’t fair to say that the savvy tech consumer is more likely to purchase HDMI, and before doing so, research the products and tech specs on the Internet? Google suggests the term “HDMI cables cheap” so I’ve got to believe there’s a lot of resourceful techies out there doing their due diligence.
Do a post on printer ink, and you’re more likely to hear gripping from a ton of consumers…who admittedly feel like “idiots” for paying so much…
June 13th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Everyone seems to be missing the point here.
There may very well be a convenience factor to getting cables immediately, but this is irrelevant. Prices should *not* reflect what people are willing to pay for them, they should reflect marginal cost.
There is no reason why the store couldn’t provide the convenience at a price of “cost of super-cheap cables” + “opertunity cost of storage” + “cost of labor” + “tiny profit”. If the market was at all functional, then competition would drive prices to this level.
Companies that charging 1600% mark-ups, refuse to stock cheaper cables, and lie to their customers, should be prosecuted.
Any business model dependent on the ignorance of their customers should be regulated out of existence.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am
There are low prices for these things. Use Google, for gosh sakes. I bought 4 HDMI cables for $1.04 each from Amazon at the store that wanted to charge me $30 a piece using my iPhone.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Nice try, Yglesias, but I answered this question definitively back in November. Why don’t you try coming up with your own topics for a change.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I have just had the very same experience i.e. difficulty of finding cables at fair prices.
Try Fry’s mail order.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Of course, this is pretty a stupid assertion. There certainly are situations where higher quality cables most certainly will deliver higher quality signals. It’s just that an all digital connection like HDMI is not one of those situations.
Sorry, I should have clarified, I was only talking about HDMI cables.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:12 am
The problem is that right now the only sorts of big box electronics stores able to exist and keep going are the ones that do these things which, yes, are crude and exploitative, and typically depend on a low-paid and very young work force emotionally drum-beat into accepting the managements’ drive to sell more and more high-profit accessories and services over plain box items.
I don’t know why this is. It just seems to me that absent any sort of (currently inconceivable) regulation of profit margins, I don’t see how else these stores can both pay for themselves, pay for their labor, not charge some sort of separate ‘we need profit’ fee, and give the stock returns that investors demand.
Maybe this links into broader critiques of the favored economics of big box stores, able to get tax breaks and state and local favors that local competitors don’t. Maybe it’s possible for there to be a few regional brick & mortar places able to sell decent items for low profit margins but that they can’t go nation-wide.
On the one hand, yeah, it’s so ridiculous that it’s awful to watch people wasting money on things that don’t (in my view and in market-based measures) merit such profitable margins, but on the other hand, I don’t see how these nation-wide chains survive otherwise.
Which is not to say that there’s an abstract good that they should, but they are remaining profitable, most of their clients return, and when people get royally screwed and come to hate these stores / chains forever it’s usually not about paying double or triple prices for cables or other rinky dink accessories, it’s from more serious screwing-overs.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:17 am
You can see the idiocy of the commenter a bit more clearly from his subsequent paragraph:
The “core functionality” of a Ferrari and a Volvo is “identical”?
Believe it or not, but there actually are situations where you can pay more for higher quality functionality…
There’s no need to get nasty. I think you’re going a little overboard here. I agree with you that you can pay more for higher functionality. But how much of that is necessary is up for debate. Some people can tell the difference between Monster cables and others can’t. For the latter, the expense is unnecessary. The same goes for cars. Some people see the value in buying a Ferrari, others would opt for a less expensive car that will still get them where they’re going.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:17 am
“For myself I wouldn’t suggest that there are no performance differences between measurably low quality cables and measurably high quality cables. I.e., low grade materials, shoddy manufacturing where tips fall off, etc. The point is that there are no measurable quality of performance differences between cables made well and of the correct materials and similar cables under premium brands.”
Well, here’s the thing: an HDMI cable either works or it doesn’t.
My (cheap) HDMI cable works. What this means is that if I were to replace it with the best HDMI cable in the world (made out of gold flake and unicorn tears), I would see zero improvement in my television picture.
The same is true for other digital signal cables like USB. If my USB cable works, replacing it with the best USB cable in the world won’t improve my data transfer speeds in the least.
But the same is not true for analog cables. If I have a perfectly functional analog cable carrying audio or video signals, I can actually improve my results by getting a better analog cable. In the analog world, things like connectors, cable material, and shielding actually matter, which is why Monster was able to build a business in the first place.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:20 am
David Shor:
Yer missing the point. The main component here is that people want their cable right frickin now. Those who are truly ignorant would not be buying a $70 cable in the first place. (What, I got a high-definition TV, all the programs that I get on it are therefore in high definition now, right?)
I actually I saw this dynamic in action when I ran into a former colleague of mine at Best Buy. He was buying the whole HDTV/home theater setup, and groused a little about the $70 cable but was going ahead and buying it anyway. I told him that he could get it for $10 through mail order. Already knew that, didn’t care. He wanted to hook up everything that evening and he wasn’t going to wait.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Although remember that this lab is trying to sell its services (both to cable manufacturers and to the broader market), here is one of the only places where HDMI cables are actually tested and rated for performance, rather than just on HDMI certification (which has to do mainly with meeting various technical and compatibility standards).
Also, remember that for the most part, the HDMI format was designed primarily with Hollywood’s needs for complete control of digital content against sharing and copying in mind, not for the needs of consumers and for its technical strengths. (I.e., you could have used or implemented all sorts of other high bandwidth connections for HD digital content and interactive features & controls, but the industry which had the most weight were the content producing industries which focused on their needs to protect copyrighted materials.)
Most of the time, though, if the HDMI cable works, it works, and any performance losses will probably never be really noticed or revealed. But if it doesn’t work, it may very well be the cable, but not necessarily the price or brand — change one out for another and maybe a wire wasn’t bent or mis-manufactured.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Yes. Maybe. But only when the difference is a measurably better cable. Monster was able to build a business at a time when everyone else made crappy and inferior cables. That’s no longer the case, though, but Monster doesn’t lead the industry with any real technical or quality innovations. Their analog cables are better than worse cables but not any better than equivalent yet often much cheaper cables.
The people who mix the music you listen to in studios do not fetishize the make and marks and brands of cables, assuming they don’t have some specific sponsorship deal with a cable manufacturing company. Those are people to whom matters of engineering matter, and pseudo-scientific claims from manufacturers of wires & cables don’t fly.
But, hey, Transparent Audio (large 22MB PDF price list here) offers a nice pair of quantum engineered speaker cables, an 8-foot pair, for a bargain price (for their magic quality) of only $33,000, but you might get them for less if you’re buying several at a time.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:44 am
There are two issues being conflated in this discussion.
The first is whether some brands of cables are “better” than others.
The second is how would a consumer be able to determine this.
Leave aside this particular instance and look at the new health care plans being debated. If you are going to be required to evaluate competing plans how will you do it. The example of the Medicare plus plans is instructive, there are so many mix and match options that few people can actually pick the one that is best for them.
Even if you do decide because, say, it covers a particular drug that you are taking, what happens if you need some other treatment in the future that you didn’t evaluate?
I think this demonstrates that even a “public” insurance option is not going to solve the problems that an insurance-based system uses. On the other hand a treatment-based system, like that used in Canada, does not suffer from this defect. You go in, show your card and that’s the end of your payment evaluations. Everything from then on is focused on the appropriate care.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
For the sake of amusement, a $500 ‘audiophile’ Cat5 cable, which I’m sure Denon only produced for really gullible people. (Discussed here.)
June 13th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Having been an owner of small retail sporing goods store I know that any item located on or about the check-out area has the highest profit margins, however I still catch myself being suckered in a tossing such items in my basket. Keep in mine that just because an individual item has a high profit margin doesn’t necessarily mean it very profitable for the store. It’s that old volume factor. Maybe Electronics retailers don’t sell that many HDMI cables.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
pseudonymous in nc: Holy crap. Maybe AssHead is right, and we are proxies, because I know I’ve posted that bullshit Denon cable before here and was leaning toward doing it again.
However, the awesomest point about that Denon ethernet cable is that it spawned great satirical reviews on Amazon, which are really funny the first time you read them.
and
June 13th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
If you’re only carrying video from your cable box to your HDTV (and bringing the audio into a receiver/HTIB) there is no discernible difference in quality between HDMI cables and component video cables.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Kids these days, they just don’t remember.
I however, remember the old days back before they came up with the phrase “user friendly” and instead used the phrase “idiot proof” (to me that change in terminology was the storming of the Bastille of the information age).
I mean also the terminology “idiot tax” relates to the standard assumption in economic theory that everyone is super sophisticated. Once behavioral economics was a fringe movement (I remember that too) and so Laibson and Gabaix have to make it absolutely totally absolutely clear that they are not assuming rational expectations.
There is a very very important difference between an agent with extremely limited information and rational expectations and … well … uh, any actual real live human being in the real world.
Common sense based on anything remotely related to real life, will not lead you to guess the Nash equilibrium outcomes with agents who don’t know the facts but do instantly understand every possible way in which someone might try to take advantage of their ignorance and have analytic capabilities greater than all the computers in the world plus all the people in the world plus all intelligent life in out space. The word “idiot” is (or at least at the time was) needed to get economists to notice that the standard smarter than a million Krang’s assumption was not being made.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
> But the same is not true for analog cables. If I have a
> perfectly functional analog cable carrying audio or video
> signals, I can actually improve my results by getting a
> better analog cable. In the analog world, things like
> connectors, cable material, and shielding actually matter,
> which is why Monster was able to build a business in the
> first place.
Technically true, but… In the 1970s the quality of high fidelity electronics and speakers available to the average consumer increased by several orders of magnitude. But most people were still connecting those electronics with the same high-gauge (thin), cheap lamp cord they had used to hook up their first record player in 1960. Monster Cable (which came along around 1985 IIR) and its competitors did the listening world a favor **at that time** when they pushed the market into providing better-quality cables and measurably improving signal quality. And they charged a reasonable premium for their product which people who didn’t want to venture to an electrical supply house to buy cable were quite willing to pay.
But after that improvement was made Monster and its competitors couldn’t quit: they had to keep “improving” their product. From 2000 or so Monster has been selling cables thicker than heavy-duty jumper cables for prices approaching $20/foot! And backed up by all sorts of psuedo-scientific bullshyte. It is hard to see how that is in any way ethical or moral, even under the rules of capitalism.
Cranky
June 13th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Well, I’ll call them stupid then. Physicist here.
Copper is an element. All atoms are identical. Nobody makes a better copper atom than anybody else. The differences between cables, then, lie on the fringes.
1. Is it well shielded? Monster claims to double shield cable but even if they do, it is pretty useless. Once a cable is completely surrounded by conductor, it is isolated from external electromagnetic fields. Surrounding is a second time won’t do much. There may be an effect since shields are conductors, not superconductors, but that would be difficult for me to measure in a lab, let alone hear in a digital signal. Once shielded is plenty.
2. Is there good strain relief? That is the thickened rubber next to the plug which prevents it from tearing as the plug angles into the socket.
3. Gold plating on the plugs. Monster tells you this is for enhanced conductivity. That is bullshit. In fact, because of the impedance mismatch between copper and gold, gold plating probably degrades the signal somewhat because of reflections and interference. Essentially, it creates a resonant cavity in the cable. However, again, that is something I think I’d have a difficult time measuring, let alone hearing. Gold plating is for one thing and one thing only — corrosion resistance. Aluminum plating would also work.
Similar principles apply to computer cabling. Monoprice will sell me a cable that fits the bill for 3 bucks. In fact, I just bought an iPod cable from them for that price, the same thing that Apple will sell me for $20.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Maybe Electronics retailers don’t sell that many HDMI cables.
They do, just in the context of the HDTV package that costs $2000, which makes the cable seem cheap by comparison — and makes cheap cables feel like a false economy.
There’s a genuine “want-it-now premium” in terms of inventory, or what you might call a “laziness/didn’t-know premium”, in that the dispersed nature of shopping in the US means that you might not know that the Lowe’s nearby sells cheaper HDMI cables, or that there’s a little shop in a strip mall on the other side of town that sells cables at $2 each.
The US is still, in many respects, a nation of Sears catalogue shoppers.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
The funny thing here is that in this day and age you can hardly buy any of this electronic crap without researching it on the internet. People who walk into a store to buy a television are like people who walk on a car lot to buy a car.
Maybe it’s an age thing. I still think it’s more convenient to stay at home and click on the internet than it is to drive to the mall and walk around taking notes on what’s available. Just bone lazy, I guess.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
It looks like it’s a huge pain to add RAM to the new macbook pros. Bastards!
June 13th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
The real questions is why most Blu-ray players don’t include an HDMI cable in the box. Basically every HDTV on the market today has HDMI inputs, so why the hell are they packaging Blu-ray players with S-video or RCA cables?
June 13th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
“However, the awesomest point about that Denon ethernet cable is that it spawned great satirical reviews on Amazon, which are really funny the first time you read them.”
Those are pretty damn funny…
June 13th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
ploeg,
It doesn’t matter. The prices of any good should approach marginal cost by means of competition. This includes the bundled good “The ability to get this HDMI cable NOW”, who’s marginal cost is only slightly higher than the good “HDMI cable”.
It’s one thing for you to tell your friend “you have to wait for it to come in the mail”. But if this behaved like most goods in the market, you would be able to say “Ah, skip on the cable, Fry’s electronics sells them for $5 down the street.”.
The fact that they don’t do this, implies that something is very wrong.
June 13th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
All you who ordered those cheap cables online – how much did you pay for shipping?
That $7.95 HDMI cable from Newegg has an $8.69 shipping charge, for what I believe is the cheapest option (UPS 3-day).
June 13th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
All you who ordered those cheap cables online – how much did you pay for shipping?
Monoprice ships USPS First Class. Plenty of eBay sellers working with high volume and low margins do the same. So it’s usually a buck-something for a 6ft cable.
Apple has actually got better with RAM in recent years, probably because it was a running joke that only suckers bought RAM from Apple.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
“Apple uses expensive, high tolerance RAM.”
And you can buy exactly the same high-tolerance RAM from a third-party vendor for a lot less than from Apple. Power Users know not to buy ANY RAM from Apple.
“I can actually improve my results by getting a better analog cable. In the analog world, things like connectors, cable material, and shielding actually matter, which is why Monster was able to build a business in the first place.”
Being an AV designer and installer, and having seen results on an oscilloscope, I can tell you definitively that you can NOT see any difference. I took a cheap Radio Shack twisted-pair cable with crappy pressmolded RCA ends (not the ‘gold’ ones) and ran the same signal through them as I did with the custom made 100% shielded Coax with gold-plated RCA cables that were 30 times as expensive. The oscilloscope can not lie, there was NO difference. Monster Cables are 100% ripoff, no matter what they make, their only purpose is to scam people out of money for useless parts. They first made ’speaker’ wires that were so huge (#2?) that the resistance from all the copper was higher than the amp could push!
That being said, there are reasons for specifying the better grade cables, such as running them past noisy AC lines. The gold plating does nothing for signal, but they do prevent corrosion, so I use gold connectors only for installations that are never going to move for 20 years. I specify shielded coax wires for long runs that go past AC mains.
“the HDMI format was designed primarily with Hollywood’s needs for complete control of digital content against sharing and copying in mind”
Which is why I rarely use HDMI – because the MPAA crippled the spec to make sure it barely works. In the professional world I work in, video has to work 100% of the time, since I’ve seen HDMI flake out live in front of hundreds of viewers, I refuse to use it. I’ve had high-end clients call me to complain about HDMI TVs refusing to show video because the components have been designed to assume everyone is a pirate. Give me component analog video any day because it will work every time with perfect clarity.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
“All you who ordered those cheap cables online – how much did you pay for shipping?”
Do your business with Amazon and plan ahead to get free shipping. Keep a book or two in your shopping cart to your order to get to $25 and they ship for free, or spend $70/yr to get free two day air on every small order.
—–
I’m old enough to remember the golden age of cable buying back before the dot.com bubble burst.
Back in them thar days, online retailers were massively subsidizing their shipping costs with money from investors looking for market share, so next day air was usually free. You could order a $2 ethernet cable from buy.com by 10pm, and for free shipping they’d have it fed-exed to your door in 12 hours.
It was nirvana for cable buying.
June 13th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
No it doesn’t. For a 3 foot cable, it may be true, but the longer your cable gets, the more likely that a higher quality cable with better shielding is necessary. Gizmodo did tests and found that the 3 and 6 footers from Monoprice do the trick well, but at 35 and 50 feet, they underperform the Monster cable and have significant, visible noise.
Digital video data can degrade over distances. With video, it’s not like a web page where it has to get there, but rather it has to get there at the right time in the right order.
In short, if your cable is short, you can buy a cheap cable, if you only need 720p or 1080 you can get buy with a cheaper cable. If you need a long (>3m) cable at 1080p, test out a cheap cable, but chance are you need an expensive cable. Since few people have a need for long cable (TV next to cable box and PS3), people have generalized that what is true in that case is universally true.
I say this as owner of cheap 6 ft cable. It’s all about your use case.
June 13th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
“In short, if your cable is short, you can buy a cheap cable”
Agreed.
And this is true with all digital signal cables, be they HDMI, USB, Firewire, or other. You need to do your homework and buy accordingly if you want to send any spec digital signal further than usual for that spec.
But at usual distances, digital cabling is just a matter of work versus not work. It’s a commodity product.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Back in college I used to laugh at the idea that more expensive “audiophile” cables could make a stereo system sound significantly better. I was willing to pay slightly more for something bigger than 24 gauge wire, but that was it.
Then on a lark I put a friend’s fairly expensive speaker wire on my system. It really did sound like an entirely different stereo system. (These weren’t Monster cable, btw; they were from a small audio manufacturer.)
The explanations for better sound from better cables may be BS, but it most certainly is the case that most more expensive “audiophile” audio cables sound better than the stuff you get at Rad Shack.
For all that, it may well be the case that more expensive digital cables are snake oil (I don’t know; I’ve never had occasion to use them).
June 13th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“Digital video data can degrade over distances”
Unless you use the right equipment, that is. One place I work at has a BluRay player running through 300 feet of Cat 5 to the HD projector, which plays onto a 40 foot wide screen, and you can NOT see any difference.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Monster not only sells hype, they do so at the expense of product quality. Their 1/4″ instrument cables have slightly oversized jacks so that they feel like they’re making a really solid connection. Of course this ruins the jack on your guitar or amplifier by bending it back.
Also, Monster gets pwned here.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Actually, El Cid, the Hollywood-mandated encryption (called HDCP) used on HDMI helps insure that any bit loss whatever will cause a complete fail for a few seconds while the system rekeys and resynchronizes. So if an HDMI cable works at all without obvious dropouts (at least with HDCP-using components like DVD players) there is simply no quality difference.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Thankfully there are a number of digital safeguards, including not only the HDMI standards (including HDCP) but processing equipment inside the display itself.
This is from a helpful article that was on Audioholics:
And here’s an example from a longer cable review article (also Audioholics), both indicating that it’s more complicated, that it’s a mess, and everything may be fine for a consumer and some signals or every signal may be a problem at greater lengths, and one hopes not at lesser lengths:
And yet when the reviewer hooked up real equipment to see these errors, most of the time everything worked perfectly. Not all the time and not under all conditions, but most of the time.
So, in effect, yeah, the various certifications and safeguards should work, although every now and then you just get a crappy cable.
Remember that a number of users may be placing these cables where they cannot easily be accessed or changed, such as inside walls, or high up in suspended ceilings for large display environments, and as was mentioned before, you can see why people in critical environments may choose to revert to analog connections (which, of course, can have their own sets of problems).
June 13th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Interestingly, while Apple does overcharge for RAM, they sell HDMI cables at a pretty reasonable price (about $20). This may be because the main reason they sell it is for the Apple TV, which is sort of a tough sell already (though I happen to quite like mine).
June 14th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Comrade Rutherford: thicker wire –> lower resistance
June 14th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: I think that’s probably an unduly pejorative terminology. He says “ordinarily, we would expect competition to push prices down.” But what that really means is “assuming perfect information we would expect competition to push prices down.” And it’s pretty clear that insofar as accurate information about the relative quality and available price points of HDMI cables spreads, competition will push prices down. But not surprisingly, most people don’t seem to actually have much information about this. So the tax on low-information consumers works. But I don’t think I want to call them “idiots” just for not knowing about this. It happens to be the case that I’m a pretty informed consumer about electronics, but I think it stands to reason that there’s some other field of purchasing endeavor in which I’m regularly getting hosed. [...]
June 14th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Actually there is a good reason for even smart people to buy Apple computers with extra RAM from Apple. If you are also buying Apple Care, then your RAM (and anything else you buy with the computer from Apple like a monitor) is covered. If you install third party RAM you may have to deinstall if the computer is malfunctioning and you have to service it under Apple care.
Now *disk drives* is an area where you are better off going third party — Apple doesn’t even sell 2TB drives for its Mac Pro — so buying 2TB Western Digital drives is way smarter and way cheaper than 1TB drives from Apple.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:07 am
61: That sounds like a good reason for smart people not to buy Apple computers with extra RAM from Apple. Most other computer manufacturers don’t care if you install 3rd party RAM. Asus tried to do a similar thing with their Eee range, users kicked up a fuss, and they backed down.
June 15th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I bought a 6-foot HDMI cable online for $5.99. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I bought a 3-foot cable from Radio Shack for $34.99 to tide me over. Once the shipment arrived, I return the Radio Shack cable for a full refund.