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Is Monster cable getting better?

I don’t like monster cables in general and I know it has bad reputation(nothing but marketing) among audiophile & videophile. It is like bragging about your Bose system to people playing high end audio.

I don’t know why but not many high end cable company makes hdmi cable. So I picked up a Monster 1000HD hdmi at best buy and thought Monster is all about marketing and its performance would be easily surpassed by other cable company. I tried Audioquest hdmi3(not sure if it is genuine but bought from an A’gon member with 500+ positive feedback), bluejean, bettercable, monoprice… Monoprice has the worst performance but it only sell for $5. Some silver cables might render a little more detail than the Monster 1000HD, but the contrast and color and overall performance are still not as good as the Monster. The monster 1000HD looks very natural and smooth without loosing details.

I guess I am done with hdmi cable search and will stick with Monster for hdmi cable. Has anybody tried the Monster M2000 and is it much better than 1000HD? For audio cable I am using transparent and haven’t tried Monster yet. Maybe they are getting better, too.
yxlei

Showing 3 responses by larry_s

larry_s
128 posts
 
If you think an HDMI can make video look "better" or "worse" compared to another HDMI cable, please do some reading on how HDMI works for video. It's impossible for a HDMI cable to uniformly change a video stream of encoded bits. If you do see a difference, it's not because of the cable - most likely faulty recollection or faulty hardware.
larry_s
128 posts
 
Kirkus, you are right on the money and thanks for adding that. I was ignoring the cable length and quality issues because trying to keep people from falling for the "voodoo" that's rampant with analog video and audio. Also, at one point in the "history" of HDMI/DVI all receivers and transmitters were not "equal". Some people with long connections would replace a source or target device and the connection would no longer work properly - no connection or sparklies. Although I haven't noticed this reported recently.

Getting back to Monster, their cables are usually well constructed and work - just way too high priced.

larry
larry_s
128 posts
 
Here's something I posted in another thread here about HDMI cables and video. It will save some of you the trouble of looking it up....

HDMI uses TMDS (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling) to send data. In short, each 8bit data value is encoded into a 10bit value before it is sent over the "wire".

The encoding is done to minimize the 0->1 and 1->0 transitions: The encoder chooses between XOR and XNOR by determining which will result in the fewest transitions; the ninth bit is added to show which was used. In the second stage, the first eight bits are optionally inverted to even out the balance of ones and zeros and therefore the sustained average DC level. The tenth bit is added to indicate whether this inversion took place.

In order for a cable to uniformly change a video stream that looks "better" or "worse", the random bit changes of every 10bit value would have to somehow decode to uniform changes in the resulting 8bit value. Chances of this happening - ZERO.
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Sending PCM over HDMI is somewhat different. The audio info is sent in between the video frames (blanking interval, IIRC) and is has error correction (unlike video). When just audio is sent, video frames still have to be used. However, the clocking is sent over a separate "wire" of the cable so recovering the clock on the target end and "synchronizing" with the incoming audio data could be prone to jitter.

larry
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